


meet me where the end begins

by jolie_unfiltrd



Series: i have zero chill re: gensa [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, GENSA GENSA GENSA, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Jon/Arya if you squint, Letters, Longing, Resolved Sexual Tension, Sexual Content, Singing, Slow Build, The post-canon gensa fic that literally no one asked for, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, direwolves, otp: battle braids and a battle axe, otp: the red wolf and the bull, past Arya/Gendry - Freeform, past Jon/Sansa, resolved emotional tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-01-02 19:13:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21166559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jolie_unfiltrd/pseuds/jolie_unfiltrd
Summary: It started out as a casual friendship, born of necessity, of being the ones left behind, with ravens flying between Winterfell and Storm's End with increasing frequency throughout the years. When the kingdom collapses, to no one's surprise, and Bran disappears, they don their armor and go to war, once more.Or: the post-canon Gensa letter-writing fic that literally no one asked for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this baby is (almost) completed and i'm planning to update weekly for the next several weeks. 
> 
> to be clear - it's post TV canon, and started out as my way to make sense of the garbage fire that was the final season. also - VERY heavily inspired by sansa's killer battle braids and how delicious gendry looked in those leathers, like, damn. 
> 
> i hope you enjoy it, i have so enjoyed writing it! thank you, as always, for reading my forays into different ships, and different styles. <3 
> 
> (dedicated to @flibbertigiblet and a certain anon who gave me such a good boost to continue writing these gensa fics. thanks guys!! like wow!!)

The ship sails into the horizon, dark clouds gathering to match her mood, a cloak of black – the very one she stitched with hopeful hands and a feather-weight heart – laying heavy in her arms. It is ragged, torn, and so worn the direwolves impressed onto the leather had faded into smooth grooves, faint hollows. She runs her finger absentmindedly over the crossing straps.

Sansa had wanted to remain stoic, serene, standing here at the end of the pier as if Jon wasn’t sailing away from her, wasn’t leaving her once again – but the threat of loneliness hits her like a clanging bell and she falls to her knees on the lonely pier, lungs heaving and vision swimming as she fists her hands in the folds of her dress.

She loved him, had brought thousands of Northmen to rescue him from the one place she swore she’d never go back to, had been willing to go to war for him, to bring him home to Winterfell, where he belongs, where he has always belonged, next to her – and instead he is exiled.

And instead, he leaves her.

(She had hope, once, and the belief that life was a song, that true knights of beauty and valor would come to her rescue.

She used to sing).

It takes her some moments to stand up again, but she does, for she is a Stark with a spine constructed of steel and ice, and the Starks endure – through the longest nights, the darkness, the snows and the fires alike. (Sometimes, she wonders at the point of it all, bitterly ruminating over the empty space in her heart, at her hearth where her family should be. They have all chosen it, in some fashion, to be alone. And her exiled brother-cousin? He has Ghost, and Tormund, and freedom. Sansa turns the word reward over in her mouth until her tongue is tender from biting back the thought).

Arya leaves the morning after – if morning can be called such, when the dawn has not yet splintered the sky. She escorts her sister to the docks, doe-eyes sparkling in excitement, in wonder of the journey ahead, having refused any words of goodbye, any sentiments of caution, claiming that they will see each other again, that Bran had seen it. Sansa bites back the words of wondering as she follows her spirited sister in the near darkness, picking her way carefully along the wooden boards.

_Will it be before spring spreads over the lands we fought for together? Will it be after a long summer, when you walk into my life once more – unrecognizable in your adventuring, while I am unchanging in my loneliness? Or will it be when copper hair is white as snow and my body lined with wrinkles, eyes clouded with age and bitter disappointment?_

Arya’s quick form stills, for just a moment, as she sees that there is someone else waiting near the ship: a tall, broad-shouldered man that Sansa hardly recognizes. She had seen him before, she was sure, at Winterfell – but there had been so many people, and so many buried, she could hardly keep the dead straight in her dreams, let alone in real life. But the way her sister looked at him – a lingering, meaningful glance that was near impossible to interpret – it takes effort for Sansa to keep her face steady, to rein in this newfound knowledge that her sister had adored someone, had been adored (it takes more effort not to be envious in a way that is all-consuming) (_everyone you love leaves you_, she thinks, despairingly and all too honest).

Lord Gendry Baratheon – newly legitimized, dark cloak sweeping his across his broad shoulders – opens his arms hesitantly and sighs in relief as Arya indulges him in one last embrace.

Sansa lowers her head until copper hair shields her like a curtain, to protect them, and to protect herself – she is so lost in her thoughts that she misses, altogether, the look of goodbye on the faces of her sister and Gendry, the air of finality in the soft press of her lips to his cheek.

Arya turns to her sister, embraces her tightly, and walks proudly up to the ship with direwolves stitched on the banners. A grand adventure, Sansa thinks, looking at the way Arya is bobbing on the tips of her toes, cat-like and curious and ready for anything.

She sails away. (_Everyone you love leaves you_.)

So, Sansa stands next to this near stranger on the dock, as the stars disappear and her sister disappears even as she feels like she has just gotten to know her, properly and – it is no use. Tears track down her face silently as the sun rises and the ship sails and she pretends not to notice the way the rising sun glints off of her silent companion’s cheeks, or the tightness in his palms as his hands curl into fists.

It is a mummer’s farce, to stand and pretend her heart isn’t broken, so she does not try. They stand vigil together, these two near-strangers, before turning back and walking in silence to the castle.

\---

Her body aches with exhaustion, each limb filled with the despair and worry and bittersweet relief of these last weeks, heart beating out of defiance of what has been done to those she loves, defiance of how easy they all found it to walk away from her – and yet, sleep will not claim her.

She sighs. Arya’s parting gift, a slim dagger with a ruby in the hilt, is light in her hands and tucked easily into a hidden pocket of her gown as she slips from her chambers, past the sleeping guard and down the hallways of the Red Keep – familiar and haunting and full of ghosts. Brienne would have a fit if she were here, but she is guarding King Bran’s chambers, at his behest.

(She had thought this new kingdom would feel like a triumph, that being back in the place of her nightmares with all of her terrors long dead would taste like victory. But instead, Cersei’s death feels hollow; this woman who was, for so long, the enemy, the source of hatred nestled deep in her breast like a burning coal, and she simply perished under the fire of yet another enemy. It had been all too neat and terrible and Sansa hadn’t believed a single letter on raven’s wings until she saw it with her own eyes.

And when she had… well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. If she looks back, she will drown in the past, in the fury that will consume her quick as wildfire if she lets it. So she doesn’t. She can’t. She has things she must do, a people she must rule.

A coronation to attend.)

But she exploits whatever freedom she can snatch in this awful place, knowing that tomorrow she will depart for the North once more – back to weirwoods and heart trees and stone castles and no one who knows her, not really and the memories that linger heavy on her shoulders, burdensome on her heart – but for now, for tonight, she moves through the hallways like a wraith in her dressing gown, hair unbound and tie loose around her waist, footsteps soft in empty halls.

A flip of the coin. Loneliness. Freedom. It is neither, it is both.

It isn’t until she’s halfway across the castle that she realizes her feet have steered her purposefully towards the cellars – though she had only visited them once before, in her earliest days in the keep when her afternoons were still her own – and as she descends, the smell of the cool stones and the fragrant wine is enough to remind her of golden braids and cruel hands clutched around golden goblets, to give her pause, but she takes a shuddering breath and move down into the belly of the beast.

This had been Cersei’s temple of sorts, the gods at which she worshipped, ruby-red lips stained by her offerings. And now, Sansa feels it time to make an offering of her own, of herself, in memoriam of the innocence she had lost here, in these walls, what feels like a lifetime ago.

She grasps a flagon of wine, pulling the cork off with her teeth and drinks, long and deep. It is fruity and sweet and somehow, it still tastes ruined. But the wine tastes sweet enough for her to drink it down, to forget that somedays, sometimes, she is the one who feels ruined. It is her who traces the scars crisscrossing across her hips, her back, the tops of her thighs. It was her who made mistakes, over and over again, trusting the wrong people for the right reasons, refusing to allow Brienne to protect her –

A sob echoes from her chest as she remembers that Brienne will stay here, in the capital of the newly formed South. In this cesspit of awful men with too much power, to keep her brother safe. Does she even consider him a brother any longer? The three-eyed raven inhabits his body, it’s true. But the little boy that would laugh and offer easy smiles to his sisters… he is long gone, long surrendered to this mythical role he must play in the formation of a new Westeros.

And the rest of her family? Arya has sailed away and Jon is gone and Rickon is dead and Mother is dead and Jon is gone and Father died in this godawful place and Robb’s ghost haunts her and Jon is -

Sansa leans against the wall, wine clutched in her hand as she sinks down, rough stones scratching through the thin fabric of the gown, letter herself slump against the cool stone and lean her head back – swallowing deep the poison and allowing herself, just this once, to wallow, to drown in self-pity, in loathing, in her anger and deep, unending despair. It isn’t long until she feels the buzz of wine through her veins, the flush of her cheeks in such stark contrast to the cool tracks of tears.

_Everyone you love leaves you._

It would hurt less, she decides, pulling up the fabric of her gown to bare her calves to the empty room and the chilled air (for no one is here to see the razor-thin white lines that wrap around them), if it weren’t so terribly true. She had learned many lessons from Baelish – one of the tenets of which had been the power of the truth, and how to bend it to suit your purposes.

Tomorrow, she decided, she would bend the truth to suit her. She would tell herself that this parting is only temporary, and she is granted her independence and given the chance to prove her worth to her people and –

She sighs. She tips the flagon back once more. Not tonight.

Sansa had hoped for oblivion, for a chance to mourn, for soft limbs, made heavy with the heat of the alcohol. Instead, she is restless, unsteady on her feet as she climbs the steps from the cellar and wanders the halls of the Red Keep. Teasing her bottom lip with her teeth, considering for half a moment the consequences, the worry – but the castle is asleep, the only ones who could stumble upon her are ghosts and chambermaids. Besides, she is no longer afraid of this place.

She has seen worse than ghosts.

Her fingertips trace the rough stones along the walls, the tapestries, the columns, the other hand bringing the sweet wine to her lips with a regularity that would have worried her father, and especially her mother. It would have made the edges of Cersei’s lips curl up in a cruel facsimile of a smile. She had once thought the queen to be so beautiful, and her son the very picture of what a handsome prince should be – but life had taught her enough lessons about beauty to avoid looking herself in the mirror.

It should have been no surprise when she found herself on a walkway, standing precariously close to the edge, staring at the spot where her father’s head had been, wondering, idly, what it would be like to fall, what it would have changed to have fallen that day. The agony she could have avoided, the joys she would have never known. Would it have been worth it? To never see Jon again, to never know Bran or Arya in their older, stranger (but still alive) iterations – but she would have never understood the tutelage of Petyr Baelish, or why the skin on the back of her neck prickled each time he looked at her, or been married to Ramsay Bolton and suffered for his attentions. She would have never known how it felt to know Rickon was within Winterfell’s walls and yet – to already mourn him.

Her shoulders are heavy with grief, sorrow, yes, but mostly, her exhaustion drags her bones down like an anchor. Like a sinking ship, like a burning boat in a sea of flames.

Sansa peers over the edge, swaying lightly on her feet – the answer doesn’t really matter, she decides, for she has always played the game for survival above all things, survival and the safety of her family and her people – and as she is about to step back, she hears a shout from behind her.

The flagon drops down down down and shatters. She plunges her hand into her dressing gown pocket to pull out the dagger – but before she can even grasp the handle, warm arms have wrapped around her waist and yanked her backwards, to the safety of the hall. She spins out of the embrace – perhaps a little too fast, for it takes a moment for her to find her feet once more – and finally pulls the dagger out. She puts it to the neck of this stranger who dares to touch her, to handle her in such a fashion, to yank her from her mournful reveries.

She freezes for a moment, blue eyes widening as she stares up into eyes of Baratheon blue - the man from the docks - before realizing that the tip of her dagger is pressed firmly against the throat of Lord Gendry Baratheon of Storm’s End, who, thankfully, looks some mixture between amused and concerned.

She swallows her diatribe and - pulling her dagger back - moves away, still unsteady on her feet, and as she stumbles, he steps forward, clasping her elbows to keep her upright, rough hands wrapped firmly around her upper arms.

“Brienne!” he calls to the side, ignoring the quick, puzzled furrow of her brows as she looks at him, as she feels the warmth of his hands seeping through the thin sleeves of her dressing gown, as her eyes cut to the side and fixate on his calloused hands still encircling her arms, just in case she stumbles once more. “She’s here!”

No one touches her anymore, except to say goodbye. Jon had pressed his lips to her forehead like a brand, but that was long ago, and after he returned from Dragonstone – after he returned with a Targaryen queen – he had hardly looked at her. (For some time, just after Ramsay, she had flinched with every gesture in her direction, jumped at the sound of a blade against a plate, been brought to tears by the howling of hounds, and so, they had left her alone in her own skin. It was easier, that way, truly).

She hears Brienne’s footsteps echoing in the hall to her left and drags her eyes back up to the man in front of her, unsure and unsteady in the wake of his touch. He doesn’t know, she realizes, the rules about touching a queen – or rather, not laying a single finger on her unless you were specifically assigned to do so, as a part of your job as Maester or maid. She thinks it likely that he also doesn’t know about her time with Ramsay. (Even Arya had stayed from her side for a few days after she was told, and when she returned, restrained herself from the hug Sansa had longed for the most. It was then that she knew, for certain, she was ruined. _You will never forget me_, he had said. It surprised her, how she still longed for oblivion. Even now.)

It surprised her how relieved she was that he did not know, about the rules, about Ramsay – that he did not think her ruined, and would offer a touch, even a stranger’s touch, freely.

Lord Gendry offers a reassuring smile before his eyes drift, quick as lightening down past her collarbone, and a flush spreads over his cheeks and he releases her, just as Brienne comes around the corner, bright hair loose around her tense face.

“Lady- Your Grace,” the knight exclaims, “you were not in your rooms and I –“

“I’m alright, Ser Brienne,“ Sansa comforts her protector, her friend, offering a reassuring smile even as she sways on her feet, even as she knows her face is tear-stained and blotchy.

Brienne’s eyes cut to Lord Gendry and back to Sansa, eyes soft even as she nods to Sansa’s state of dress and murmurs quietly that she seems ready for bed. Sansa follows the path of her glance and realizes her dressing gown had fallen open at some point in her wanderings, ties dangling around her feet even as it revealed the contours of her body, hidden only by a thin shift. Soft pink spots of color appear on her cheekbones as she hastily wraps herself back together, tying the dressing gown over her shift with a firm knot.

(She wondered if they had seen the scars. She wondered if they thought her broken too.)

“I was doing my final rounding on the castle –“ _ah, so it seems the knight couldn’t find her rest either_ – “discovered your guard asleep at his post and feared the worst. He’s been properly scolded and demoted, never you fear,” she goes on, “but I thought you’d been…”

Kidnapped. Murdered. Drowned yourself in your sorrows. The words she doesn’t say sit heavily in the silence between this odd trio.

Brienne’s eyes dart to Lord Gendry as he shrugs lightly. “I heard Brienne scolding him from down the hall and, seeing as I couldn’t sleep either, thought I’d join the search party.”

Despite herself, a smile lifts the edges of her lips and they share an amused glance, each having been privy to Ser Brienne on a warpath, before looking away.

“To bed, my lady?” Brienne is questioning and kind, but her tone brooks no argument. The wee hours of the morning are no time for a woman of her status to be wandering the castle, no matter how much alcohol she had indulged in, hoping to forget everything, just for a while.

(If anything, the wine had worsened the heartache. Cersei never mentioned that.)

Sansa nodded and they proceeded to walk towards the wing of the castle that held her chambers.

At the door, Brienne insists on inspecting her chambers thoroughly, having no trust in the guard that abandoned his post nor the castle guard overall, apparently. Sansa was sure it was one of her goals to whip the lot of them into shape the way she had poor, sweet Podrick.

Lord Gendry and Sansa stand in the doorframe of her chambers, his broad frame towering over her own. She wraps her arms tightly around herself and tries to go back to being the Ice Queen, but with little success. He had yanked her from the precipice, had touched her, and it seems that she has no choice now but to be open with him - particularly when it seemed he’d had a question on the tip of his tongue for the entirety of their walk back. The wine loosens her own lips and she demands, “Oh, spit it out, already,” still half-cross with this man for interrupting her drunken solitude.

“Did you know?”

A furrowed brow is his only response.

“Did you know she was going to leave?”

_Ah_, she thought, _Arya_. Her Tully blue eyes soften at the thought of her sister and she shakes her head, slowly. “If I had known… I would have asked her to stay.” It was a small comfort, that their bond would have added weight to the argument to stay with her sister. It was less of a comfort to know it would not have been enough.

He chuckles lowly as he admits, “I did,” as if it were a secret in this dark confessional between them.

“You asked her to stay?” Gendry shakes his head and rubs the back of his neck, glancing down the corridor.

“I asked her to marry me, to be the Lady of Storm’s End.” Her wide eyes must be comical – she couldn’t help it, she only learned about the two of them that very morning – for he starts to laugh at himself in earnest. “I wasn’t really thinking,” he admits, “only that I thought I would finally be able to offer her something.”

“Arya doesn’t care about all that-“ she starts, but he shrugs.

“I know,” he says, eyes somber all of a sudden and a twist of regret to his mouth. She recognizes the mood.

“You just wanted her to care about you,” she offers, gently, an offering from a place of understanding.

His eyes meet hers suddenly, a flash of blue in the firelight, and she feels compelled to give even more. Her gaze breaks as she looks around the corridor, the empty places where tapestries had once hung – a bland garden scene had once hung on that wall, there, and she had wanted so badly to rip out each thread and start anew – the scones illuminating walls that still smelled faintly of smoke.

“I swore I’d never come back to this place.”

“But you did come back,” he says, eyebrows drawn together in consternation. “Why?”

“I swore I’d never come back, that no good would come of a Stark who goes South,” she continues, voice soft in the storytelling, “but then…” she sighs, heavily.

“Jon.”

“I offered to pardon him, you know. The North is within my domain – or, it will be when I’m crowned.”

“Then-“ It is clear when he understands. “He said no.”

She allows a quick smile to flash on her face, heartbreak written in every line, and she offers it to this strange man, this company in loneliness. She can see the moment he understands that they are unwitting, unwilling partners. Both in love with people that run from them, that walk in every direction but into their arms.

His eyes scorch into her, seeing too much of her grief, her loneliness, the despair of being a person who is so clearly worth leaving, again and again and again. She can’t help it – she looks away. She must, she cannot bear the truth for one moment longer.

A pause. A cough. A shift to something less raw, less dangerous.

“Your coronation is next month?”

“Aye,” she says, the corners of her mouth tight, swallowing heavily even as she knows the words that will come out of his mouth next.

“Will they come back?”

She swallows and tries to be brave and to shrug off her heartache, but his words cut her off.

“They should be there, but they won’t or they can’t – so, if you’ll have me, I could accompany you.” Sansa can see his discomfort at war with his honesty, the earnest lilt to his voice.

She pretends that it is the wine that causes her to stumble over her words. “You would… you’d come North, to see me crowned?” It is unfathomable, this kindness, from a strange man bound to her only by loss of a sister. She expects pretty words, for some reason, in the brogue of his voice that belongs to the common people, that is un-lordlike and rough-hewn and open. He merely nods.

The armor slips back into place, chin raising as she says, proud of how her voice wavers only a little: “The North would be honored to host the new Lord of Storm’s End.” Brienne returns at that moment, sharp eyes flicking between Sansa and the dark-haired man and a question on the tip of her tongue that she will not investigate further unless Sansa wishes her to. She doesn’t.

_Courtesy is a lady’s armor._

She sweeps grateful curtsies to them both, just the right amount of deference, before chiding herself (stupid, _stupid_ girl) as she hears Brienne cue Gendry to bow at the waist and kiss her hand and bid her goodnight. She should have remembered, he wouldn’t have known.

“Your Grace,” he murmurs, lips brushing uncertainly over her knuckles as he holds her hand gently.

Sansa straightens up, offers a smile so fleeting that it may never have existed at all, and turns into her chambers, dressing gown as regal as any other gown.

She doesn’t expect he’ll actually come, this new Lord of Storm’s End. But it was nice of him to say so. She has certainly known enough of pretty words and pretty promises to know that they hardly come true in the end.

\---

When Sansa goes to tell her brother goodbye, she does so with a sense of foreboding – walking into the throne room and nodding to Bran as he finishes consulting with the new Maester over something or another. It feels like the ghosts she has been ignoring are whispering in her ears, tales of death and destruction and dragons at her doorstep once more. After a moment, the Maester bows and takes his leave, and Bran turns placid eyes to her. She shakes off her demons and steps into the light.

“King Bran,” she says, sweeping him a curtsy of precisely the correct height, before clasping her hands calmly in front of her traveling gown. “I’ve come to bid you goodbye, brother, before we leave for the North.”

He offers her, strangely, a kind and open smile – the likes of which remind her so much of the Bran of her youth that she takes an unconscious step forward, hands reaching for him before she remembers, and clutches the folds of her gown once more. Each time she has thought to embrace him, he closes off once more. That much, at least, she can understand about this creature in her brother’s body.

“I know you are tired, sister,” he says, eyes looking up at her under his heavy iron circlet, “but your story isn’t over yet.”

“Bran?”

“I’ll see you at your wedding.”

“Oh, I’ll be getting married again?” she says, drily, hating when Bran does this even as she thirsts for the information he can provide, curiosity and longing for some certainty overriding any ounce of sense that her mother had instilled into her.

(_Jon_, her heart pounds an unsteady rhythm which she does her best to ignore, but it beats again and again. _Jon Jon Jon_).

“And, when everything happens, when you call for your banners, call for the bull. You’ll have need of him.”

“The bull? Bran, I don’t –“

His eyes rolled and his face slackened and her brother was lost to her, back to the ravens, once more. She fists her hands in her gown, looks skyward to clear the tears from her eyes, before stepping forward to press a gentle kiss to her brother’s cheek.

“Goodbye, brother. I’ll miss you too.”

After a moment of gazing upon his face, too young by half to hold the weight of this country in his hands, she sighs and turns from the room, traveling gown heavy on her shoulders. The men wait in the courtyard, with caravans full of orphan children that the South cannot provide for, but the North could, easily, with its stores of food meant to sustain several armies over long, endless battles, and glass gardens that had – thankfully, gods be good – been spared. Bran had given her leave to gather up as many lonely souls as she could find – and there were many – and shelter them in the North. Dirty faces peer out at her as she trotted her horse past them, eyes wide with wonder, and she offers a simple wave and hesitant smile to them.

The faces disappear from sight, but reappear seconds later. Her smile grows, but she hides it, turning forward, knowing there would be ample opportunities to speak to the children – and, more so, that she would be infinitely more comfortable once they have crossed the land into the North.

“Ser Cregan,” she says to her Masters in Arms, “let’s go home.”


	2. Chapter 2

He spends the week in the forge of King’s Landing, rough and slip-shod as it is. He didn’t know the proper etiquette for what gift to give a new queen, and Ser Davos had hardly been any help, so he sticks with what he knows: the heat, the melding, the working of something old into something new and more beautiful. His hands are out of practice, at the first, but soon find a rhythm in the work. Melt, and cast anew, melt and cast, hammer and pound and push and pull and heat and hammer and move and bend and –

One afternoon, he is done, staring at the circlet resting on his workbench. King Bran had been kind enough to gift him a sapphire, when he mentioned he was working on a project for the Queen in the North – he could have sworn the man’s eyes twinkled mischievously before returning to their normal placid state – and it had been set carefully in the center of the tiara. A gently sloping triangle which led down to a simple band, engraved with emblems of the North, as he knew it: direwolves and weirwoods and Winterfell – for he could think of nothing so quintessentially Stark as Winterfell.

He had only made something so intricate once before – when Arya asked him, in the odd lull between fighting the dead and preparing to forge a new kingdom, which he supposed was a different battle altogether, to craft a petite dagger with a small ruby in-laid on the hilt. Arya had requested it to be sharp and pretty, and though he had been honing his craft for years, between the dagger and the circlet, he had never spent so much time thinking of how something would look.

But it was important, this circlet, he knew it. He didn’t know much about Queen Sansa – only that she looked, sometimes, so lonely, when she thought no one was looking. But he had heard whispers of this Red Wolf, of the way the fought for her people. Had seen the snarl on her lips as she faced the commander of Queen Daenerys’ armies and threatened him, bodily, without so much as a flinch or a hesitation. Had watched her say goodbye to her sister, to wish her well on her adventures, even if it left her alone in the place of her nightmares. Had witnessed the strength of her spine as she pressed a dagger to his throat, not knowing that his hands had crafted it for her unknowingly, had spent hours on the twists and turns surrounding the in-laid ruby.

This circlet was not for a pretty, innocent princess who knew nothing of the hardships of the world, but a fierce woman who had fought for her people, for her life, for her happiness. He hoped it would inspire fear in her enemies, and devotion from her subjects.

Mostly, oddly, he hoped she would like it.

\---

The dawn of her coronation brings fresh snowfall to the halls of Winterfell, a quiet peace that only occurs when the world is muffled. Sansa spends her precious few moments alone at the battlements, drawing the hood of her cloak back and tipping her head to the sky, feeling the snowflakes melt on her warm cheeks, get caught in her eyelashes, dampen her hair.

“Your Grace?” Her new maidservant calls from the stairs, wrapped in her furs, voice still hesitant. Minisia doesn’t know her well enough yet, but Sansa intends to win her over. She intends to win them all over. She has seen what it looks like, to rule with fear, to rule with passion, and the results are far from what she’d wish.

“Oh, Minisia, thank you for fetching me, I’ll be right there,” she smiles warmly before letting her eyes drift, once more, to the horizon.

(She had really hoped he would come, for this. For her).

It wasn’t often that she would accept luxuries that her people would not have – but on this day, she allowed them to treat her thus: a warm bath, oils brushed through the tendrils of her hair until it gleamed, even under the weak winter sun, perfume carefully pressed at the hollows of her throat, the beating vessels of her wrists. It felt like a wedding, and she supposed, in some ways, it was. A wedding to the North, the only one she’d accept.

Remembering Bran’s last message to her, she laughed a little under her breath, wondering if he’d make it – or if he’d send a raven. Or if there was another wedding, in another world – for she surely couldn’t imagine it in this one.

Furs the color of Lady’s coat are draped over her shoulders, a gown of Stark gray underneath stitched by her own hands, white wolves leaping around the hem of the skirts. Hidden within a secret pocket is her dagger, a way to keep Arya close. And finally, and all too quickly, she is ready.

Later, she will only remember a few moments of her coronation with perfect clarity: the sound of swords scraping out of their scabbards to be thrust high in her name, Lord Gendry raising a goblet to her during the celebration feast with a cautious grin, and Lord Yohn Royce embracing her with wine-flushed cheeks, telling her that her mother would have been so proud of her and blinking back a sudden onslaught of tears.

For now, all she can think is that it’s too much – too many people, too hot, too much pressure, and that she must escape, at any cost. She strikes up a song and dances, warmly, through the crowd, smiling and nodding graciously and leaving the smile plastered on her face as she struggles to breathe. The young Lord Glover entraps her in a dance, hands wrapping around her waist a little too enthusiastically and she is caught in a conversation with Lady Delia Hornwood about her daughter’s new baby and Lord Cerwyn’s oldest son catches her hand for the next dance, nevermind that he is a foot shorter than her and seems content to spend the evening talking to the front of her gown and –

Lord Gendry grabs her by the hand and places his other delicately on her waist, before leaning in to say quietly, “I’m no good at any of this, but you look like you need to get out of here.” She raises an eyebrow at his strategy, certainly – what does he expect to do, dance her out of the hall? (To be fair, that had been her strategy but she had forgotten the circular movements of some of these Northern reels).

To her surprised delight, he does – and without stepping on her feet or the edge of her gown more than a few, easily forgivable times. He maneuvers them to the edge of the hall and carefully releases his grasp on her waist. (She is ashamed of the pleasure she takes in his warmth. It has been so long since someone touched her. It has been longer still since someone’s touch made her lean into them, rather than recoil.)

They walk in silence to the window, letting the cool air wash over them, cleanse them from the sweat and grime and cheer of the hall. The moonlight is brighter than he would have expected, but then, he had never been able to appreciate the beauty of the North during his last visit. It gleams and reflects in the sapphire of her circlet.

“I haven’t had a chance to thank you, Lord Gendry,” Sansa says, “for coming North.” _For standing in_, she doesn’t say. _For being here in place of the ones that wouldn’t come, or couldn’t, or were buried in the crypts long ago. _

“Gendry, please,” he says quickly, rolling the title from his shoulders with the deference of one who has spent his entire life avoiding the way a name could define him. “I couldn’t just give that to some strange rider and trust that he’d bring it to you safely,” he says, gesturing to her circlet somewhat bashfully.

She offers him a small smile, and then something grander: “You must call me Sansa, then.” A mischievous grin flashes across her face. “Someone must, else I’m afraid my head will get so big it won’t fit in this lovely crown that you’ve made me.” 

His face flushes with genuine warmth. “You like it, then?”

“Oh, yes,” she says, removing the circlet with delicate hands to admire it once more – something she hadn’t been able to stop doing since he showed it to her upon his arrival a week ago. “I was wondering though, why the sapphire?” Stark gems tended towards the practical – obsidian, steel, iron. This was, set in stone as it was, bordering on the edge of whimsy for a Stark queen – and she had been delighted to see it.

“Ah, I… I thought you deserved to have some of Ser Brienne with you at all times, to protect you.”

A sad smile lingers on her lips as she looks at him and replaces the circlet on her copper braids. “That’s a lovely thought, Lo- Gendry. Thank you. I like it very much.” He bows a little, she laughs a little, and they stand, comfortable in the silence between them.

It is easy to stand and enjoy the feel of the cool breeze and the sounds of the raucous celebration behind them, which so far shows no signs of slowing. Sansa supposes she should take it as a compliment, that they are so overjoyed by her coronation that the party will last until the dawn. However, she may be a dreamer, but she is far more pragmatic than that, now, and knows that joy can be sparked from a full belly, and barrels of wine and ale, and the dangling promise of a marriage prospect for the younger lords of the Northern houses. She is so lost in thought that she almost misses his murmur, as he stares out at the horizon, just as she had done that very morning.

“I thought they might come, for this.”

There is no question as to who they are referring to.

“I thought so too,” she says, before shaking her sorrows off, offering a smile and bidding him to enjoy himself, as she returns to the celebrations, intent on dancing until her feet ache and her mind is numb and she can’t think on any man with dark curls and brooding eyes, or a sister that sailed away from her twice.

She hadn’t expected that Gendry, less a stranger now, and more of a friend, would help her feel less alone.

When he rides off the next morning, somehow less hungover than the rest of them by half, she bids him a warm goodbye, letting the mask of courtesy slip for once, and waves him off, wishing him safe travels as it seems that winter has not left, not yet.

Snow falls for the next fortnight.

Sansa can’t quite explain the sigh of relief when she receives a raven from Ser Davos thanking her for sending Lord Gendry and himself with enough furs and sweetmeat to ensure they made it safely to Storm’s End.

\---

She sends a letter, a few weeks later, to thank Gendry for standing up with her, for making sure she wasn’t so alone on a day which could have been one of the happiest of her life. She bites her lip until it bleeds, worrying about how to best thank him for the circlet that is wrapped around her brow even as the ink dries on the page, but ends up sending the kitchen cook’s recipe for the roast he had complemented during the feast. It is woefully inadequate, but maybe it will bring him warmth in the winter.

Darkness falls, she burrows into the furs and wish for Ghost to warm her feet, before she drifts into sleep, dreaming – nonsensically – of a man with blue eyes in dark leather who stood for her when no one else would. She hadn’t expected to dream of him: his hands on her waist, dancing in a room lit by the roaring fires of the hearth, his bright blue eyes gazing into hers softly. The scene repeats on a loop, over and over again, a story that her mind insists on telling.

In the morning, she would chide herself – what a foolish girl, what a broken woman, unable to take his token of friendship and leave it at that. In the morning, she would puzzle over the dream as she nursed a mug of hot tea, eyes closed as she waited for her headache to wane.

In the morning, she would scold herself, for the warmth of her body, the shivers in her spine as she realizes this tendril of heat in her belly is named desire.

This man loves Arya. She loves Jon. Both of those things are true.

(He stood for her, he came for her when no one else would – this is also true.)

\---

Winter falls heavily on the continent.

Snows fall, icy winds blow across the plains and mountains until everything is covered in ice.

The death of the Night King seemed to have angered the old gods, and this winter is worse than anything in recent memory, according to Samwell.

Bran writes that it will be over soon but doesn’t specify what soon means.

For all that he is all-knowing, he is also vague, and it annoys Sansa to no end.

Sansa spends a significant portion of her days _not_ wondering how Jon is faring.

It is harder than she might have hoped. 

\---

Gendry writes her back, in his own hand, clumsy and stilting and meandering all over the page, even as he apologizes for how it looks. Apparently, Ser Davos is “a very good teacher, but not a miracle-worker” and she can’t help but to laugh as she reads it. He tells her of the current state of Storm’s End – neglect, mostly, but untouched grain stores behind the castle – and the people’s reception of him – indifference, but for the lesser lords, who look on him in disdain. (Though, he’d never say that, not outright. Instead, he used language that used to make her blush and instead, she reads it and laughs out loud in her solar.) He tells Sansa of the destrier that he was gifted, and that he much prefers learning to ride than learning to write or be a Lord. 

He writes to say that he’d make her another circlet, she need only to say the word.

He, apparently, already has ideas for how another could look.

_Gendry, Lord of Storm’s End,_ he signs his letters. (He adds a post-script, that Ser Davos is making him practice his signature and it is practically torture and it’s worse than history lessons because no one gives a flying rat’s arse – and here several words are crossed out. Ser Davos’s neat handwriting pens an addition to the side. _My apologies, Your Grace. This onion knight can’t teach him decorum. Perhaps you could?_)

But Gendry’s letters are not the only things the ravens bring. A marriage offer from Dorne, accompanied by a sprig of dried primrose, missives from the Citadel discussing winter’s course, tidbits from Bran – when he deigns to share information with her, longer diatribes from Tyrion on the state of the Southern kingdom. Sometimes, just a branch the likes of which she’s never seen, a delicately woven piece of fabric, a rock that – when opened – holds a gemstone inside the exact color of their brother’s eyes; these all smell of the sea. (It is good to know she’s still alive).

And then, one day, a letter on rough parchment is handed to her in her solar.

_Sansa – _the letter starts with the name that no one calls her anymore, not her ladies’ maids, not the councilmembers, not even the smallfolk, and her breath catches in her throat, heart-beating at triple speed. She knows this handwriting. She knows the smell wafting off of the pages – crisp and clean and reminiscent of firewood.

_You wouldn’t believe me even if I filled the pages with words, but it’s beautiful up here. Cold, treacherous, but beautiful. I spend my days with Ghost, hunting and camping and breathing. It is more than I deserve, and less than I ever imagined I’d get. _

_I thank you for your letters, and for your pardon. _

_All the promises I made to you – and I broke every one of them. _

_I hope you can forgive me, someday, though I know I don’t deserve it._

_Perhaps I will visit one day. _

_Jon _

_P.S. Tormund will lead a band of wildlings to Winterfell to start trading in the next few months. He asks if Brienne will be there. _

Her throat closes as she struggles to breathe around the tears swelling in her eyes, tossing the letter into the fire.

Everyone she loves leaves. (But she had thought, had hoped, that Jon might come back.)

She fought for him, she lost him.

It is time to let him go.

\---

When Daenerys had handed him Storm’s End on a silver platter, a way to assure his loyalties and keep him in line and offer him something he could offer to another, he hadn’t really thought through what it would be like. Hadn’t had the experience to consider the politics that would come with the role, the dueling lords and their idiot sons with soft hands, arguing over idiotic things like where the borders of their lands clashed, or who owed who more gold coins over some imagined slight years ago. They spoke to him chidingly, scornfully, as if he could not possibly understand.

In Storm’s End, at the outset, he is grateful for Ser Davos, the Onion Knight. Davos was able to bring his wife and their remaining boys (less than waist-high) before the brunt of winter made its power known – but he would tell Gendry stories of years and years of solitary study, of being in his own mind for he could not speak his mind anywhere else. Even with Stannis, he would muse, curling his fingers into a tight ball and releasing them once more, there was a cost to his honesty. Gendry had never met the man, but despised him in the same, retrospective way he did the Dragon Queen – for all that they had taken from the people who served them. Freedom, their voice, their hearts. He thought of Jon, exiled beyond the Wall. He thought of Sansa, crowned alone and ruling alone in a castle meant to be overrun with Starks.

Gendry had been orphaned at a young age, brought up by the heat of the forge and gruff old men that served as his masters. Some were cruel, some were kind, but all had imparted the same basic lesson: _you’re on your own, boy._ And for years and years, even with brotherhood, he had been – and he had desperately wanted to be anything but, his entire life.

(He does not let himself think of Arya, of the waifish grey-eyed girl who had haunted him for years. He does not remember leaving her, he does not remember seeing her again. He especially does not think of the way she grabbed her hand and pressed it to her breast.

With her, he had been less alone; but there had been a wild unknowing to her, a call to the sea in her light eyes. He should have known she would never stay).

But in this land, this land that was his, forbidding stone castle on the sea and all – he could make it his own. He could try that no one else feels that way – afraid to be honest, to speak their mind. Afraid to be alone. He had seen babes who hadn’t yet learned to walk orphaned from dragon fire, had seen children carrying children from burning towers, and he never wanted to see anything of the sort again. He knew what that life held, for most, for all but him: an escape into servitude was the only freedom, and that, of course, was no freedom at all.

In the mornings, he meets with the council over breakfast – a porridge and mead, something simple and filling – then the lords, and draw up plans for what they were to make of their new land. For, and Gendry was clear in this, he did not view Storm’s End as his, not entirely; he had been given a bastard’s name at birth, and no matter the Dragon Queen’s decree, he knew that his right to the area was tentative, at best. He asks the lords to help him create something new, something better – and chuckles endlessly as he tried to describe their faces in a letter to Sansa.

In the afternoons, he spends time in the forge, building new weaponry for the men and women that they had. Whatever he made, he would practice with – and he soon begins to draw a crowd. First, the little orphan boys (now under the care of several women who had been given the resources to ensure they were clothed and well-fed), peeping around the corners of the courtyard. Then, the older boys, bringing in sticks to challenge him. Then, the lesser sons of lesser lords, eager to show their hand to the ladies that would inevitably gather to watch from the halls and windows above.

The small-folk begin to trust him, first, and then the lesser lords. With those higher up, he earns their begrudging acceptance by being as fair as he knows how, as steady as he has always been, as kind as he has learned is important. Sansa writes that he is too kind by half, but he has been granted the gift of the male sex and does not need to win approval by being surprising in his steel.

In the cold, bitter and biting, it feels good to stretch his muscles, to get his heart pounding in his chest. (Gendry did not know that the ladies did not gather to watch the sons of the lords, but him; to admire the sweat gleaming from his brow, the shine in his eyes as he wielded a new weapon successfully. Their fathers begin to whisper quietly among themselves about marriage, and it was then, perhaps, that the loyalties truly started to shift to Lord Gendry).

Gendry had not been raised for the role, but he wasn’t stupid: he had been watching people his entire life. So, he makes friends. He flirts, he laughs, he toasts successes and tries to smooth over disputes as best as he could. He keeps them fed, he creates new homes for the orphan children, he trains as many apprentices as he could fit in the forge until he was barely needed there at all. He writes letter after letter by dim candlelight until he could read, could write, and even Sansa could hardly find fault in his penmanship. _You’ve put my own lessons to shame, _she wrote, and he could picture her laughter, _perhaps the Citadel is the next best option for you? _

(He cannot help but let his gaze flicker to the corners, hoping to see a slender woman, silent as a cat creeping in the shadows. He cannot help waiting to see gray eyes, locked with his – waiting for Arya to come back to him. She does not, and as the months pass, it feels as though she never will. Perhaps it is time, he muses, in the darkest corridors of the night, half-drunk on mead and the hopes of a different future, to let her go). 

But he could feel the pressure building, based on the letters from Brienne and Sansa, based on the worried looks he exchanged with Davos after each dark-winged missive. And perhaps because he was a babe born in a war-time, because he may always feel the drum-beat calling him to battle, because he had sat at that thrice-damned council and watched them doom themselves, he prepared the people of Storm’s End quietly, carefully, for war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter (11/24): two years have passed, and the kingdom has fallen (to everyone's surprise but sansa's, apparently). old friends are reunited.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so when you see -*-*- i would highly recommend listening to "let me live, let me die" because that feeling was my inspiration for this scene and everything else in this fic spiraled out from that.
> 
> oh, and her horse's name is Iara - From Tupi y "water" and îara "lady, mistress". In Brazilian folklore this is the name of a beautiful river nymph who would lure men into the water. She may have been based upon earlier Tupi legends. (according to: behind the name)

**TWO YEARS LATER**

The grip of winter slowly loosens. The snow falls with less fervor, and then not at all. There will always be a chill to the North – it’s one of the things Sansa loves best about it – but they are able to walk outside now, without fear of losing fingers or toes. The horses finally go back to the stables, and one day, she hopes, the hall will no longer smell exclusively of them. The weirwood trees bloom, delicate and bright. Small five-pointed flowers cascade along its branches and fall, without provocation onto the ground, dusting the new grass with its petals. Sansa stands and does not pray but thinks about rebirth.

Returns. Renewals.

She wonders if Arya might come home.

(She doesn’t).

Her skirts glide against the stones in the courtyard as she returns to her solar and she welcomes the sound, despite the inevitable stains on her dress. Sansa nods a hello to Minisia as she passes the girl in her chambers, before sitting at her desk and sighing at the amount of paperwork that seems to be ever-growing. It is worse, now, that spring has begun to unveil its face; spring makes people think of rutting, and rutting makes them think of marriage, and marriage is the last thing that Sansa wants to think about. 

But in the middle, there is a letter with her name on it, in slanted writing that she’s come to recognize as well as her own. She chooses to ignore Minisia’s curious glance at the stain of red upon her cheeks. The cold can no longer be to blame, nor the long walk. (Only Gendry, and his words, and the way he makes the edges of her lips curl up, without artifice or effort).

Winter has been difficult for all of them, but sometimes she thinks, adjusting the intricate circlet on her brow, that it was a little less lonesome for the friendship of Storm’s End, for the near-constant letters of Gendry Baratheon. They had come monthly, at first, and then weekly, and now it seemed that ravens were always flying between Storm’s End and Winterfell.

And now that spring is here, almost, just barely, she allows herself to think, for a moment, of new beginnings.

She starts to hum a melody as she pens her reply.

Minisia shares a significant, knowing look with another maid in the hall, jerking her chin back to the Queen in the North, who has always been formidable and stoic, blushing and humming like a lovestruck girl. (They agree, privately, it is good to see her smile again).

\---

Only two years after his coronation, and just as the worst winter the world has seen has begun to lift, the former King of Westeros, Bran the Broken, disappears from his chambers without a trace – and is presumed dead. Tyrion writes to Sansa of the coin that was found on his bed, the token that Arya had flipped between her fingers over and over again, the coin with words of death and life. _Valar morghulis_. Tyrion, golden hair streaked with grey, drinks himself to death within the month, too tired of seeing his beliefs and hopes trampled into nothingness.

Sansa hears of Bran’s disappearance and is torn between fury and despair – at herself, at all of the stupid men who agreed to this idiotic plan. She had _told_ them, over and over again, that this is why you pick a descendant, why you set a precedent for who the kingdom should fall to, in the case of your own fall. She had told them it was a terrible idea; being right didn’t lessen the blow.

She had turned Bran’s parting words to her over in her head, over and over again, frustrating in their lack of details just as they are intriguing for their prophecy. _When everything happens, when you call your banners, call for the bull. _Sometimes she wondered if his knowledge was prophetic, or if he simply stated that he knew things and so the world fell in line with the vision in his words. It had certainly worked to put a crown on his head, to keep the nearest thing she had to a friend close to him in King’s Landing, to let Arya venture off into the unknown, to exile Jon.

When Bran disappears, and when the remnants of all of the powerful families, not quite fallen enough to lose all of their power, and not fallen long enough ago that the young men have forgotten the alluring taste and promise of war, the kingdom is – once again – on the verge of war.

The remnants of the Tyrells, bloodthirsty and greedy as ever, climbing vines with thorns who threaten to overtake, set themselves up in court as if they are the next to rule – and with the Lannisters as decimated as they had been, it was a possibility. They overthrow Bronn easily, murdering the sell sword in his bed – long past his best days of fighting and any honor he may have once had. They prop themselves up in the capital, and send missives to Sansa, to the Iron Islands, to Dorne, that they will retake what is owed to them.

None of the green boys aching for another war would know what it had been like in the last one; the Tyrells had stayed ensconced in the Reach, even after Bronn was awarded Master of Coin. Snakes laying in wait in the darkness, in the cold. None of them had been present at the council, none had seen the fire in her eyes or the unyielding steel in her spine – the North would not bow to them, never. Neither would the Iron Islands, nor Dorne; but she knew where the battle would first begin, which kingdom they would come after first.

_The North remembers. _

She calls her banners.

She is furious, she seethes, she gnashes her teeth so hard at night that she wakes in the morning with an aching head and does it again each night. They are hardly ready for another war, this kingdom so ravaged by dragon-fire and ice and a dearth of crops. She can’t imagine that the smallfolk are thrilled – but perhaps, in other areas, war is a way to get food in the bellies. To get food rations distributed, to gather the people. The North united for the War Against the Others; perhaps the rest of the continent had had no such reason to come together.

(Perhaps they were already starving, and how could war be that much worse?

It is this kindness that she offers them, in her thoughts. It is the only kindness she can imagine. She writes as much to Gendry, though she is sure her fury ekes out onto the pages, dark with ink splatters as she lets her heart onto the page; she does not want to fight another war, but she desperately, despondently, decidedly cannot lose the North. Not again.

Bran knew, Bran _must_ have known, and where is he now? Sansa can’t help herself, she keeps picturing his body splayed on the flagstones, a repeat image from his childhood days. _Everything that is happening now has happened before, and will happen again_, the oily voice croons into her nightmares).

She calls her banners, but she does not call for the bull. (Sansa doesn’t even know who the bull _is_). She doesn’t try that hard to find out, doesn’t even mention the title to her small council.

It is her one rebellion, her test. If she does not fall in line, what will become of her story?

In the end, it doesn’t matter.

The bull comes anyway.

\---

Dawn breaks, and with the morning comes two riders, sharing nondescript horses and wearing dark, rough-hewn clothes – but it is hard to hide sapphire eyes and shoulders meant to cut down any man at the first blow. The scouts reported their approach hours ago, but Sansa just bid them to let the pair pass – and to escort them to her tent when they arrive. She had been wondering if the lady knight would find her, would want to come to her once the capital had fallen, once Bran had disappeared. She had wondered, equally, if she felt any guilt for the death of King Bran; Sansa could not quite quash the flicker of anger that seared into her each time she thought of her companion, lingering for protection that she was not able to offer.

Ser Brienne dismounts from her horse, and Sansa stands, poised, at the entrance of her tent, hands clasped tightly in front of her, face placid as still water.

“My lady,” Brienne begins, bowing, before remembering herself and breaking habit, going to a knee in front of Sansa, and letting her head fall with the utmost deference. “Your Grace,” she intones, the pride and affection intermingled in her voice. Ser Podrick repeats the movements just moments later, weary and near-swaying on his feet.

Sansa strides forward, placing a reassuring hand on Brienne’s shoulder. “Rise, please. I see that you are weary, but won’t you break your fast with me before you rest?”

“There is much to tell before we rest, I’m afraid,” Brienne says quietly as she stands.

“Whatever it is, it will be better over bread and salted meat, Ser Brienne,” Sansa replies, her tone brooking no argument, and she turns, knowing they will follow her inside to the warmth. They may be on the cusp of spring, but the chill still lingers, and there is a chill in the Queen in the North, as well.

It is silent as they eat; Brienne may have intended to discuss matters of importance first, but the warm mead is too tempting to resist on their empty bellies. Podrick had not even tried to maintain a conversation and even now, as his plate clears, his eyes begin to droop. Brienne shoots him a fond and exasperated look, but he is already drifting happily with his head slumped on his hand.

It is silent as they finish, as well, but only for a moment.

“I won’t waste any more time,” Brienne starts, blue eyes intent in the early morning light, “I came to tell you that your brother is alive.”

Sansa swallows heavily, taking a deep breath before setting down her goblet.

“Alive?” she says, choking out the word over the lump in her throat, over the beating in her chest that threatens to drown out all sound, over the darkening at the edges of her vision.

“Alive,” Brienne nods, fervently.

“Ah,” says Sansa – and that is all she can manage for several moments.

Then: “how?”

“Meera Reed, Howland Reed’s daughter, helped him escape – had stayed behind in the castle under everyone’s noses –“

“Meera?” Sansa exclaimed, brows furrowed. Bran had mentioned her – several times, in fact – and each time, he said her name like a sacrilege, like a broken promise. Sansa wondered if he had fallen in love with a girl and sent her away for what he could not offer her (children, marriage, a life together) or would not offer her (smiles, laughter, the freedom of a life untethered by fate’s demands).

“She spirited him away one night, I don’t know how, but he explained to me shortly before that I must stay until Tyrion falls, and then come to you.”

“Did he tell you why he had to disappear?”

Brienne’s face, lined with exhaustion, became darker still, nodding once. “He was looking for something, and I think he found it.”

Sansa asked the inevitable question. “What was he looking for?”

The knight hesitates, before plowing on, brave as ever. “The last Targaryen dragon.”

Horror floods her body immediately, viscerally, stealing her breath and making her woozy. His intentions are unclear but there is an undercurrent of disbelief, of sisterly knowledge that remembers her mischievous younger brother, unafraid. Her brother thinks he can warg into a dragon, her brother left the realm destabilized to go after a _dragon_, her brother is alive – it is all too much to handle.

“There is more, my queen,” Brienne offers once Sansa has stopped spinning, the honorific dropping from her mouth as if she’d been waiting to say that for months, years. “Meera is pregnant with Bran’s child.”

“The King has an heir,” Sansa says flatly. “Of course he does.” He had never said, explicitly, that children were not a part of his future, only that the role of the Lord of Winterfell was unsuited to him. She had, perhaps wrongly, assumed.

“They do not intend to rule, they intend to find Drogon and neutralize him, if possible,” (the wave of horror hits Sansa anew, she had _seen_ these dragons, they _both_ had, they’d seen the havoc they could wreak in such a short amount of time) “- and then release Bran from the role he has taken on.”

“That of king, or all-seeing?”

“Both, I believe,” Brienne says, delicately.

Sansa lets her face fall into her hands in a rare moment of pure frustration, rubbing her fingertips across the building pressure at her forehead, allowing Brienne, her once dear friend, to see all of the emotions at the forefront. After a moment to gather herself, she dares peering up at the woman across from her, pragmatism taking hold. “And does my brother have a plan for who is to inherit his kingdom?”

One look at Brienne’s face told Sansa that she would not like the answer to her reasonable question.

“You, my queen.”

“Seven hells,” Sansa swears, nearly upending her goblet in her surprise. Podrick jolts at her exclamation, grabbing at where his scabbard would normally be before taking in Brienne’s amused glance and relaxing once more.

A silence rests between them once more, much less expectant than before, but familiar.

She had missed her friend.

“I am sorry,” Brienne starts, voice rough as she picks apart what is left of the salted bread and tears it into smaller pieces, “that I was not there for you, in the North.” Sansa starts to shake her head, but Brienne’s emotional glance begs her to wait, to listen. “I should have been there, for your coronation and every moment after. Bran insisted I stay behind, and though I begged to journey to Winterfell, he said that I was needed at King’s Landing. I am sorry that you were alone, my lady.” The old honorific brings the prickle of tears to Sansa’s eyes, though she is furious at her brother, once more. She wonders if she will always begrudge Bran the happiness of that day.

“I-“ She says the only thing she can think of. “I was not alone, Brienne. But I have missed you, my lady knight.”

“And I, you,” intones Brienne, bottom lip quavering.

Podrick’s loud snore sends them both to laughing, saving them from further tears.

“Will you stay with me?” Sansa asks, at long last, rising from the table and looking up at the knight. Her tone is clear and kind – this is not a demand, nor a request, but just a question.

“As long as you’ll have me,” the knight replies. There is a sorrow in her gaze, and Sansa considers the golden-haired man she had left behind, the one she had buried. Brienne deserves hope, and a fresh start, perhaps more than any of them.

She had wondered once if Podrick had been a possibility, but he seemed a mentee and companion; though he adored Brienne, she held him at arm’s length. Sansa had a suspicion that Brienne would allow no man in that could not match her on the battlefield, and there was something to be admired in that. Besides, Sansa had seen the way her handmaiden’s gaze lingered on Podrick as they entered her solar. She wonders if Minisia had heard the rumors that had been passed along, amidst raucous laughter to Tyrion, that she hadn’t been able to help but overhear just before the Long Night.

She flushes as she exits the tent. She hadn’t thought about that rumor in years. Hadn’t thought about a man in her bed, in years.

She’s not sure if she ever will again.

-*-*-

The North’s forces gather with those from the Eyrie at the Trident.

Her council had urged her to stay behind in Winterfell, where she would be safe. She had listened patiently to their arguments, then dismissed them soundly, kindly, with a gentle smile and courtesy and all the tools in her arsenal. They do not know her fears, they do not know her heart, the truth of what she had endured. Half of her horrors had been endured in Winterfell – from the Boltons to the wights, and every shadow that danced on her walls in the early dawn in the time in-between. It wasn’t that she no longer feared death; it was more that she understood that life, itself, could be equally frightening. Sansa had grown rather tired of being afraid.

The North gathers, a mix of former wildlings and former Northmen and former Dothraki and Unsullied and all others who had wished to stay, after the first war. In their furs, standing among the horses, lighting fires and laughing, it is difficult to tell the difference between them; you must peer closely, to see the tensions that still underwrite some men’s shoulders. Even then, it is often quickly dissipated. The North may remember, but it is not war that they remember, but the peace that had followed, the peace she had worked for, tirelessly.

Sansa glances sharply up, one afternoon, from where she was talking with one of the generals on the hillside, raising a hand for silence as she hears the rapid staccato of hoofbeats. A lone rider, with Stark insignia on their breast. Ser Dilhe steps in front of her, hand on his sword, even as the rider dismounts not twenty paces from them. She tenses, hand automatically going to the dagger at her side, until the rider is at her feet, on his knees, panting – and she recognizes him, trusts him. The third son of a lower house in the North, one of their best riders, a scout.

“Your Grace, there are forces gathered across the hill,” he pants, cheeks flushed with exertion.

“Under what banner?”

His eyes flick to the side, uncertain, before they look up to hers once more. “A bull, Your Grace.”

Sansa’s eyes narrows, but she dismisses the scout to quench his thirst and take care of his horse, and nods to Ser Dilhe at her side. She had decided to test the whims of fate, and that the bull has come to her, instead, changes nothing. (Except that maybe she does believe in fate, or at least, in Bran, after all).

Her commanders usher the troops to start lining up in battle formation with a sharp whistle, followed by two more. The signal is taken up again and again, a method of communication picked up from the wildlings that turns into eerie howling against the background of the forest. They hold the defensive, she knows this, but it doesn’t stop her heart from jumping wildly into her throat.

It is only a moment later when her horse is brought to her – the beautiful white mare, her Iara – and she mounts up into the saddle, having long ago abandoned her side-saddle ways for comfort in the long days of riding. The monstrous horse paces under her anxious grip and she soothes her as best as she can as she maneuvers into position. It is easy to notice when her mount’s delicate ears prick forward.

She hears hoofbeats, marching, hears the strict staccato of a drumbeat keeping them all in time; forces pour over the hill, carefully regimented and restrained. At the head rides a broad-shouldered man wearing a golden helmet with a striking outline: the broad head of a bull, complete with horns that she can see from where she sits astride her stallion.

Once they are halfway-across the hill, and there is a clearing between his army and the North’s, he holds up a hand, and they halt, one after the other, a wave of stillness that cascades across the gathering.

The bull, alone, rides forward, and stops in the middle of the space between them. He is waiting, though for what, it isn’t clear. Her head tilts to the side, fire-lit hair streaming in the wind and across her face as she considers those shoulders, that profile, the way that he seems achingly familiar. They wait in silence for a minute more, and Sansa hears the northmen begin to mutter amongst themselves.

_I must be brave_.

Before her commanders can think to caution her, Sansa maneuvers Iara through the front lines and gallops out into the open, towards this strange man on a horse. She trusts her archers, and besides, perhaps she trusts her brother, after all.

The wind whips against her in such a frenzy that she is glad for her tightly braided back hair, for the way Minisia had insisted on braiding Iara’s mane as well. Sansa knew they made quite a picture, one of a warrior queen and a mystical mount – something for the stories - and she was glad for it; imagery has its own power, songs another.

She pulls sharply on the reins as they approach the rider’s dark horse, and before she can even call for the man to remove his helmet and state his business, his hands are already easing the golden bull from his head, revealing hesitant blue eyes, dark hair that is longer than she remembers, and the slight quirk of a smile, hovering at the corner of his mouth. 

“I know, I know,” Gendry says, chuckling a little at the look on her face – flabbergasted and relieved and expectant, all at once. “I should have sent a raven.”

Sansa laughs loud enough that the archers lower their bows, bringing her horse even closer to his and offering a broad smile. “My poor scout was about to keel over in surprise,” she responds, chidingly. “Besides, what sort of banners are those?”

“I’m no stag.” The curl of his lip is enough to remind her of his father, of the man who had fathered him but not raised him, of the squat, terrible man who was cruel and boisterous and looks nothing like this warrior lord in front of her. (Though, if she looks closer, squints and digs back in her memories of King Robert from long ago – she can imagine what he must have been like in his prime. She imagines, a faint tint of pink coloring the tips of her ears, that he must have looked like this, and oh _how_ the ladies must have adored him).

“But you’re a bull?” The blush on her cheeks belies her casual tone. (She might have forgotten how handsome this man was, with his brazen eyes and hair as dark as night and shoulders that remind her that this man spends his time in the world, in the forge).

“I’d made the helmet long ago,” he shrugs.

Sansa’s eyes skim his form and dart away and loftily, she says: “I like it.”

He grins, wolfish, in return. She pretends the red on her cheeks is due to the wind. (This interplay between them has only happened in letters, and it feels so good, Sansa muses, not to wait for weeks for another raven to arrive to bring his words to her).

“You’ll dine with us tonight?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Gendry says, inclining his head formally at her, snorting at the rather unladylike look on her face, before amending his statement. “Yes, Sansa.” The way he says her name is gentle, soft, fond.

The way he says her name is a caress.

She fiddles with the reins to have something to do with her hands, before glancing around and seemingly realizing they are in the middle of two armies, unsure of whether they’ll fight or be at peace, and she motions to Gendry to follow her. Their warhorses amble back together towards the gathered Northmen, his dark mount in stark contrast to hers.

Sansa thinks how strange it is, to feel at home on a battlefield.

To think of spring in the midst of war.

To see his face again and think, _oh, but I’ve missed you_.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as a fair warning, i feel like you should all know that i TRY to do slow burn, and inevitably, i fail.
> 
> hope you all enjoy this chapter!

Gendry sits beside Sansa at the large table in her solar, surrounded by his advisors, Davos, her commanders, and their newly joined compatriots, Brienne and Podrick, standing in the corner, brows furrowed as they stare at the map in front of them, empty plates having long been cleared away. To say that he sits is incorrect – he reclines heavily in his chair, intentionally taking the power out of the significant bulk of his posture, nursing his mead and doing his best not to let his gaze linger on the fire-haired woman to his right.

Based on the raised-eyebrow glances from Ser Davos, he is less than successful.

\---

(Davos had never been blind, nor stupid – and he had seen the way Gendry had looked at Arya, that fateful dark night those years ago. He had seen the lad’s eyes searching the shadows of Storm’s End for a lost love – and then he had witnessed the slow, steady friendship that formed between the Queen in the North and the green Lord of Storm’s End.

“Most advisors would tell you to marry the daughter of a lord here in Storm’s End,” he’d shrugged one morning after an eventful council meeting, the two of them sitting quietly in a dark room next to the hearth. “Cement the peace, cement your place here.”

Gendry had looked to him, eyebrow cocked in a question. “And you, Davos? What say you?”

“I think your interest lies elsewhere, my lord.”

Davos had glanced significantly at the letter in Gendry’s hand, worn with how many times he had read it and reread it again. The young lord’s eyes no longer lingered in the corners, in the shadows, looking for a wisp of a girl with a warrior’s stance; instead, his eyes were turned to the sky, seeking the dark contrast of a raven’s wings against the steady snowfall. Gendry flushed to the tips of his ears and asked Davos about the status of their grain storage. <strike></strike>

Gendry was a practical lad, he’d give him that. But he was shit at subtlety.

Given how he wielded the blunt edges of his ideas as deftly as an axe, Davos hadn’t been surprised when the boy mentioned meeting her troops at Riverrun, once the pieces of the kingdom started to crumble, one by one. And for all of the idiotic things he had seen men do for beautiful women – particularly red-haired women – this was, at least, the least dumb of them all. 

Besides, this boy could be a King, if he stayed this path. 

If she wanted him, that is.

And Davos had watched the letters between them build in frequency and length and at one point, Gendry had asked him to stop reading them, dark cherry stains high on his cheekbones, avoiding his gaze. He didn’t doubt much that the lass wanted the young lord just as much as he wanted her.

But there was a kingdom to win, first, and though Davos was neither blind nor stupid, he was old – getting older every day, judging by the creaks in his joints as he stood, as he stretched, as he kissed his wife goodbye once more – and he had seen the ravages of war, the desolation in its wake. The heartbreak in those who did not return).

\---

The informal council begins with the Queen in the North updating positions, discussing family ties, and detailing the undercurrents of the impending war, as if it were a casual conversation, rather than catching the Lord of Storm’s End up to speed on things he would have had no reason to know, years ago. He admires her deft hand with conversation; he often feels that his blunt edges either endear the people to him or alienate them completely.

“The Tyrells met us for a parlay not a fortnight back,” Sansa says next, voice strong as steel but with a surprising dash of mischief. She glances to the man at her left, but Gendry only raises a brow, inviting her to continue. “They offered what is beyond the wall to be my kingdom, and the rest would be theirs.”

Ser Davos and Brienne snort in unison – and the rest of their companions chuckle a moment later.

Sansa offers a baring of her teeth – too sharp to be a true smile - her bared teeth glimmering in the candlelight. “I didn’t think much of their offer either.”

Ser Cregan pipes in with the rest of the story: “She walked out of the parlay,” he says, conspiratorially, as if it is a secret, when Gendry knows that it is likely the entire camp knows the story and is spreading it from fire to fire, building and magnifying their chosen queen even further “-just up and left while they were calling her name.” 

He is able to picture this in his mind easily – a glinting braid swaying behind her as she gracefully exits the tent, cool gaze hiding the smoldering of her eyes as she ignores their call - and Gendry laughs outright, unable to help himself. The loud outburst is worth the sly grin that crosses her face, the light in her eyes that is only for him. 

(He does not miss the look that Davos shoots his way. _An alliance would be fruitful_. He does not want to think about such things, he never has had much of a heart for politics).

Sansa leans back in her seat, face contemplative as she looks around at the gathered group, her left shoulder grazing his arm – she doesn’t seem to notice; it is as if the edges of his vision blur for a moment. “We don’t have much time, I’m afraid,” she muses quietly. “With the Lord of Storm’s End’s forces, we are better off but this is, by no means, a sure victory.”

“Your Grace, we are well-prepared.” Ser Cregan’s assessment is honest, at the least, and earnest. He is young, most of them are young. Sansa thinks of her mother each time she sees him, wonders how his mother sent him off to war, wonders if she was still alive to do so after the Long Night, after the harshest winter. She wonders how any mother sends her sons off to kill or be killed or to starve or to get injured and hope for a quick death.

The night before they had departed from Winterfell, she had sat in the godswood for long hours, staring at the dark tears of the weirwood tree. She was taking sons from their mothers, fathers from their sons and their wives and their daughters. They were preparing for a war she did not want to fight; a war she must win. In the end, she had risen on shaky knees, sliced the palm of both hands with her dagger, and pressed her bloody palms against the tree. An offering, of herself, to the North. It was all she had to give, it was everything she had to give. She would give anything for the North.

“Let us pray that it is enough,” Sansa says finally, a benediction and a dismissal. The informal group breaks up into smaller groups, drifting off to their tents to rest. Brienne, Davos and Podrick gravitate towards each other naturally, laughing over some joke in the corner of the room as Sansa turns to the man at her shoulder. The steel in her spine softens at his warm gaze.

She swallows around the way her heart leaps into her throat, lowering her voice to speak only to him, placing a gentle hand on his arm. “I haven’t thanked you, yet.”

(He had forgotten what it was like to be touched except for in a practice fight in the courtyard.

He had forgotten that a touch could feel like anything but hurt.

Even Arya, years ago, had kissed him with teeth, leaving marks down the column of his neck, the flesh of his chest. Had loved him with a ferocity that wasn’t tender to recall, but rather like a bruise).

So perhaps his voice is rougher than he’d hoped in the space between them when he shrugs off her thanks, the soft press of her hand against his arm a burning, a flickering, a warmth. “No need.”

Her lips purse slightly, and her gaze flickers down before meeting his dark blue eyes, dark as sapphires, dark as the seas of Tarth, offering a secret that she’d told no one else. “Bran told me you would come, years ago, in King’s Landing.” She laughs a little, eyes distant as she remembers. “Well, he told me to call for the bull, but I didn’t know who that was, so how could I?”

“I showed my bull helmet to your father, when he showed up in my forge in King’s Landing,” he says in return. A secret for a secret.

Her eyes widen. “My father?”

“He came to the shop, once,” he says, nodding, voice falling into the cadence he’d had back then in the belly of the golden city. “Wanted to get a good look at me, I suppose. Didn’t find much to look at ‘sides a mouthy brat of a boy.”

“I doubt that-“ she starts to say, but he shakes his head, chuckling.

“I think I insulted him, if I remember it right.”

“You didn’t!” She sounds scandalized, but not offended, and he laughs along with her, before they settle into a comfortable silence. Comfortable, at least, before she realizes her hand is still on his arm and moves to snatch it back.

She moves to stand, moves to flee, and there will be a battle in the next day, or the day after, and he doesn’t know what compels him to say it but the words fall from his mouth like honey: “Stay safe, Sansa.”

She glances back at him, a curious look on her face, caution in her blue eyes – she had learned long ago not to get too close or too attached and with him right in front of her, this man she has built such a friendship with, there is too much at stake, too much to risk – “You, as well. Goodnight, Gendry.”

“G’night, Sansa.” He does not move from his chair, but she feels his eyes on her as she departs the tent. She can understand the question of his starlit eyes, the slight downturn of his lips. Given all that they had written, given the friendship they had built, given the easy way that they speak to each other, reach to each other, turn to the other for advice – she is as ice incarnate, towards him.

But she doesn’t know how to answer, except to tell him this: they are children of war who learned of love and heartbreak in winter, in times of death and desperation; it is understandable, she thinks, that they keep their distance. Imperative, even. Sansa used to believe a heart is the most fragile thing, but she has seen a battlefield.

Flesh is fragile, too.

And great men, great warriors – they can fall, too, as easy as the greenest of the scouts. 

Or, if he survives, perhaps he will leave, walk away from her, sail away on the next ship, never write again. From the moment she saw him again, she was preparing for him to leave her. So she bids him goodnight, walks away, loosens the stays of her gown, and falls into a listless sleep in her tent, the piled quilts and furs and tapestries still not enough to dispel the chill around her neck, the furrow between her brows.

Still not enough to forget the thrum in her chest when she saw him that day, the odd feeling of contentment, of belonging.

Of hope.

\---

It is her first battle.

Her commanders are furious at her intention, though she can hardly believe that they are surprised, after she came all this way, that she isn’t content to sit in a tent a safe distance away, pacing and fretting and winding her hands together as she waits to hear the fate of her people, of her land.

She dons the armor, specially made (she knows a blacksmith, you see). Minisia braids her hair in twists and turns away from her face, intertwining small pieces of metal and letting the rest flow free down her back. When she offers her lady a small looking glass, Sansa bares her teeth in a ferocious grin, before dabbing some rogue in terrifying streaks across her face. This is no place to look like a lady, but rather a myth come to life, a legend about to be written.

Iara is waiting outside the tent, prancing impatiently as the drums of battle begin to beat, a cadence of fury.

_Come and see_, she thinks to the impending army of Tyrells, of Southern boys who have never known the cold she has known, the suffering she has endured to get to this point. _Come and see_.

Sansa doesn’t see Gendry until halfway through the chaos – their eyes meeting across the front line of the battlefield as she rides her beautiful mare, weaving in and out of the soldiers – and he is _furious_, she has never seen such rage on the man’s face. 

He swings his hammer into flesh, he wheels his horse towards hers, but she is already dancing away and he swings again. Again. Again. Sansa loses sight of him and cannot help the queer mixture of relief and worry that hovers at the edge of her mind, even as the adrenaline keeps flooding through her veins.

It is her first battle, and the first hour is so filled with blood the field looks awash in rubies, glinting in the afternoon sun.

It is her first battle, and she is no great warrior, but she is a queen, born of the songs and sweet summertime and she cannot string a bow or swing a longsword, but she can ride and inspire and yell a battle cry into the stillness before the charge.

It is her first battle, and when it is over, Minisia, bless the girl, is helping to bandage the wound in her leg, just underneath the bottom of her armor. Sansa chided herself for her stupidity the moment it happened – she had turned her head for one moment to toss a spare dagger to her favorite scout – and the arrow had grazed her thigh. Iara’s left side had been painted in her blood.

The weight of her dressing gown is heavy in her shaking hand as Minisia finishes wrapping the bandage around and around her thigh, just above her knee. Her other hand grips tightly to a chair, eyes closed, as she hears someone enter the tent, footsteps sharp and pointed and they stop, just in front of her. She sighs, wincing as her handmaid’s hands tighten and tuck the edge of the fabric into the binding.

“Brienne, if you’re here to say you told me so, I’m well aware-“

“I’m not Brienne,” Gendry nearly growls, towering over her – and her eyes snap open to meet his gaze, just as furious as the moment he saw her on the battlefield, nostrils flared and mouth in a flat line even as his eyes seem to glow from within.

“I can see that,” Sansa snaps, undeniably breathless and unaccountably angry in return. _How dare he_ \- Minisia looks hesitantly to her lady, who offers her a nod and a grateful thanks for her help, before dismissing her from the tent. As her handmaiden slips away, Gendry’s gaze is drawn, inevitably, to the bared skin of her leg, to the bandage wrapped tightly around her thigh, to the way her hand shakes as she holds the gown.

“You’re injured.”

“Obviously,” she retorts, snorting. “But it’s nothing.” The fabric falls from her hand and she leans against the table to her left, crossing her arms over her dressing gown, tilting her head to watch the man in front of her, still covered in sweat and grime and there is dried blood across his forehead. The pulse pounding in her veins echoes that of the drumbeat from before the battle: insistent, alive, full of dark promise.

“Nothing?” he seethes, hands balling into fists as he tears his gaze away from her leg and starts to pace in the confines of her tent. “You didn’t tell me why you needed the armor.” He says, finally, standing across from her, eyes dark in the shadows.

“You didn’t ask,” she shrugs.

“I never thought you’d-“

“Ride with my men?”

“Put yourself into danger,” he hisses, curling his hands into fists as he steps closer.

Sansa can’t help it, the anger sparks in her a flame, a fury. “I have been in danger all my _life_,” she says lowly, looking up at him through her lashes, mouth set in a firm line. Pain flashes in his dark eyes, but she recognizes the hurt. Recognizes the way his shoulders cave in; this man hasn’t known safety either, not for a very long time.

“I told you to stay safe.”

“I did,” she says, glaring at him, “I asked you for armor.”

“And then rode out at the front lines!”

“You were there, too!”

“Yes, but I know how to _fight_.” She realizes then how close he has come, that they are standing a hands-width apart, no more and no less, the air between them charged as the air before a storm, crackling and dark. 

“I know what _inspires_ people to fight,” Sansa argues as her hands lift up to his chest, but whether to pull him in or push him away, she doesn’t know, she can’t know, can’t focus with this thrumming in her veins, the pounding of her heart. She wonders if she can hear it, it has become so loud in her ears.

Gendry raises a hand to the side of her face, calloused and filthy and warm, and she leans into the touch. His voice is lower now, intimate, rough. “You were beautiful out there,” he admits, as if it pains him, as if he means to chide her but it comes out as a compliment, as if it is no compliment but just a simple truth. “They’ll write songs about you.”

She sighs and closes her eyes, ignoring the flush on her cheeks, spreading down to her breastbone. “As long as they live to sing them, I will be content.”

Blue eyes sear into her until she feels their weight, the insistency of his gaze. “I wouldn’t be, if you were gone.”

It is as close as they have ever gotten to a confession to whatever this thing is between them.

In this moment, she is reckless, thoughtless. In this moment, she is not the little girl who learned to manipulate and lie, not the bird trained by Petyr Baelish, not the broken woman who thought she’d never love again – she is not even the queen.

In this moment, she thinks only of the man in front of her, the curve of his palm against her cheek, on her waist, the way his touch inflames and soothes in equal measures. Of the way his gentle smile makes her feel at home, even on the middle of a battlefield.

Sansa can be brave, braver than ever before. She leans forward, just an inch, maybe two, to capture his lips with her own. It is a steady kiss, built from distraction and the feeling of anger that still hasn’t dissipated from the air between them. She is furious, still, and it floods her skin with warmth and she blames the fury for the heat between her legs as she lets him back her up against the table, lets him lift her upon it.

As she lets him step between her legs and kiss her so thoroughly it is as if she is doused in him, drowning in him, but she does not relent; she sucks on his bottom lip until he moans, roughly. Sansa pulls his tunic from his chest, unties her dressing gown at the waist, all the while inviting his mouth to feast upon her own, upon her neck, the sensitive skin at her pulse points.

For all that there is a fury between them, a protective instinct, the touches are surprisingly gentle. Considerate. Kind.

Sansa thinks she ought to savor this, these touches she had dreamed about in fever dreams, and then in early morning awakenings, and more recently, during mid-day meals, causing her to flush and drop her spoon the second someone interrupted her from her filthy reveries. But there will be time for savoring, another day, if they live to see it.

For now, let him lay his hands upon her breast, let him groan into her neck as her hands palm his cock, let him drop to his knees and savor every last drop of her, until she is whining upon the table and panting for him.

For now, let him carry her to the pile of quilts that has served as her bed, shucking off his trousers and stepping out of his boots before he crawls towards her. Let him stare at her, open-mouthed, as she shrugs the dressing gown entirely from her shoulders, revealing the pale contours of her naked flesh beneath.

(She had been intending on a bath. She considers, now, that they may have one together – after).

Gendry stares, and somehow she is brave enough to watch the trace of his eyes, and it does not fixate on the scars of her legs, the criss-crossing white lines that decorate her flesh, but rather the swell of her breasts, the curve of her waist, the length of her legs, the area between them, covered in a thick layer of auburn curls. Under his gaze, she is wanton – she lets her legs fall open and she beckons to him, once, twice, with her finger.

But he is patient in a way that she feels she cannot be – for what if she loses her nerve? What if it is nothing like she dreamed it would be? What if it is too much and she retreats to her solitude, to the place in her head where it is always snowing and she is always alone and the godswood hasn’t been burnt burnt burnt?

But he knows her, sees her, and brings her from her head with soft kisses, spread in unequal intervals up from her ankles to the meeting of her thighs, until she is dizzy with desire, her arm thrown over her head as she moans.

His mouth travels further north, lapping at her folds until he is certain that she has met her peak once, twice, and finally – _finally_ – he shifts up, bracketing her head with his hands as he asks her permission. She nods before he has finished the question, heart beating a joyous rhythm in her chest just because he _asked_, and then shrieks when he rolls them over, and she is straddling him.

Her hands are splayed on his chest, and in the soft candlelight of the tent, she is able to, at last, admire him up close. The dark sapphire of his eyes, darkening every second that he admires her body, poised above his own. Sansa feels like a goddess, like this, something dark and wondrous and filled with an old type of magic, older than the sky, older than winter.

When she lines his cock up with her entrance, and slowly sinks down onto him, her eyes flutter backwards and she nearly misses the groan and quiet swear that leaves his lips, voice rough with restraint as he fists his hands on the sides of her hips – not touching, not pressing, not guiding – just allowing her to find her own pace.

She has become adept at riding, but this – _this_ – is another joy altogether. Another rhythm, another dance, and _oh_ how she loved to dance. The push and pull of her hips against his own is enough to drive her mad, to set her skin aflame, to bring her hands to her breasts and cup them, gently, as she leans her head back.

No lessons she had ever been taught had prepared her for this - for this longing, for the fulfillment that his touch brings, feather-light as his fingertips trace up the side of her ribs, under her breasts, around the swell of her hips, down to where they are joined.

She peaks a third time, and collapses onto his chest, boneless, unaware that she had groaned his name.

Gendry rolls them over once more, off the pile of furs, and she is laid out on the rugs that serve as her floor, hair fanning out as the flames of a hearth. He thrusts into her a few more times, coming undone at the sight of her. His head is bowed as if in worship, and though he pulls his cock from her warm heat, he curls up around her, pulling a fur to cover their forms.

He does not say anything, and neither does she. But he presses his forehead against hers, gripping her hair tightly in his hand as he presses a kiss to her lips – dry and devoted and full of promise. _Tomorrows, _it says. _If we have them, they are yours. _

And they – the two of them who are haunted by nightmares, who hardly sleep more than is absolutely necessary – fall into a deep, dreamless sleep, legs and bodies intertwined.

She had wondered if it might be different, or strange, or if she would fret over the way he looked at her throughout the day – but it is easy as breathing, and in-between skirmishes, it is simple.

He comes to her tent, or she goes to his, and they talk and then come together, slowly, dancing around each other in narrowing concentric circles until one of them – usually Gendry – can bear it no longer, and their lips meet or their hands touch and it is an incendiary flame.

But as the battles approach, as the ravens fly further and faster, with more important messages – she appreciates that he does not even try to convince her to stay where she is safest, to refuse her armor and let her hair flow free and keep Iara far, far away from the bloodshed. It doesn’t mean that he isn’t equally furious and joyous upon their reunion, afterwards. 

She rides, he fumes, they fight, and they fall together.

In the night, they give each other all the darkness they have, continually astounded at the light they receive, at the lifting of their shoulders. In the mornings, they offer affectionate touches, they dress slowly, they kiss leisurely in the light of the impending dawn. Their friendship remains – darkened and lightened and bettered by the longing, the wanting. But they do not speak about what happens between them, do not put words to the rattling of their hearts, to the way they reach for each other, first, above all else.

They are only able to run from their truth for a short while, for one day, shortly after a crushing defeat near Lannisport that left Sansa with a sling meant to cradle her left arm to her chest, and Gendry with a scar across his entire back that would have felled him had he not been warned by Brienne...

Jon Snow arrives, with the wildling army he has amassed behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen jon snow canonically enjoys dramatic entrances and i feel strongly about that 
> 
> next update (12/22 - if not a little sooner to account for some traveling over the holidays!): conversations with Jon, affirmations, confessions, and a campfire.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surpriseeee early update! hope you enjoy this chapter.   
happy holidays, everyone.

Ser Davos confesses almost at once. “We had a code, me and Jon, when we were at Dragonstone,” he says, hesitating just barely on the last word. “When we starting to march off to war, I wrote him.” The old man shrugged, unapologetic in the face of Sansa’s raised brow and icy calm. “I thought we could use the help.”

Sansa drums her fingers idly against the chair in the main tent, where they’d met for a council meeting in the first weeks together. She can’t fault him for his intention, or even for the results – they needed more warriors, always needed more warriors, and she is hardly one to turn down more men to defend what belongs to her, to her people. The wildling army led by her cousin adds almost another third to their numbers – so she inhales deeply through her nose, and tilts her head, eying the man in front of her contemplatively, gaze catching on Gendry standing just over his shoulder.

Gendry leans against a supporting beam of the tent, arms crossed and eyes wary as he watches the exchange between them, as he watches the opening of the tent, as he waits for Jon.

They don’t wait long.

Jon strides into the tent and turns to face his cousin, kneeling before her immediately. Tormund swaggers in just behind his crow king, blue eyes immediately finding Brienne and staring at her, agape with wonder. Gendry swallows his laughter _– _Sansa had told him about the way he looked at the lady knight and he hadn’t quite believed it.

When Jon looks up, her eyes trace the contours of his face, the ragged scar across his eye, the hair pulled back from his face, the clear gray eyes that make her feel less of a Stark than ever. Her father, Aunt Lyanna, Arya – there is something about the silvery tone that reminds her of the North, of ice-capped towers and a fading weirwood.

“Sansa,” he says, voice rough but eyes soft as he looks at her for the first time in years, scanning over the woven sling holding her arm close to her chest, the brightness of her hair, the distant consideration in her Catelyn-blue eyes, “our forces are yours.”

It is quiet, in the tent, though she can hear the rumbling steps of the horses outside, the laugh of a soldier as he reads a letter to send to his lady love, the stirring of a metal spoon against a pot of warm stew.

The silence is expectant, waiting for something, anything.

She wonders, absently, if he expected her to run to him with open arms.

“I thank you, cousin, for riding all this way,” she says finally, bowing her head a fraction in recognition before rising from her chair and leaving the tent, leaving frost in her wake. Jon looks baffled, and Gendry cannot help the short, barking laugh that escapes his lips (even as he hopes no one else can hear the relief in it) (he had wondered if she might fall into Jon’s arms, if he opened them) – and the dark-haired man looks to him for the first time.

“Gendry?” He rises from his knees, eyebrows raised as he took in the sight of the man. He had not expected him in her tent, sitting in with her council, that much is clear. Gendry wonders quietly if Davos had told him that they would be there, that they had ridden to her side at the first call of war. Gendry wonders if Davos – sharp, observant eyes under those wiry brows – had mentioned the friendship that had developed between Sansa and himself, if he had thought to write about the way he looked at her, or the way she found his hand beneath the table if she was unsure about something.

Gendry is almost certain that Davos has written nothing; he is a good man, and a good friend, but a shrewd political advisor.

“Jon,” he says, a brief smile flashing on his face as he claps the other man on the back in an embrace.

“S’good to see you,” Jon says, though his brow is furrowed and his eyes dart towards the opening of the tent.

Gendry waits until Jon’s gaze flickers back towards him, before raising an eyebrow and offering: “Mead?”

They sit together at a small table in Gendry’s tent – one which he must clear off, dumping weapons and partially-whittled wood and extra tunics onto the ground. The tent looks bare, a storage place more than a temporary home. Jon does not remember enough about his friend to know if that becomes him, but something about it feels strange to him.

“She’s not happy with me,” Jon ventures, offering a chagrined smile to the man across the table, a brow raised as if to invite Gendry to commiserate with him about the mysteries of women. Gendry cannot bring himself to offer an answering smile. His gaze rests on the other man until Jon’s smile droops from his face.

“You left,” he says. It is simple, it is true.

“I was exiled,” Jon exclaims, with as much fervor as he’s ever seen from the man. Gendry barely restrains himself from rolling his eyes.

“She would have pardoned you,” Gendry says, refusing to budge from this point, refusing to give this man any ground, refusing to wonder when he had set himself up as both friend and enemy to Jon Snow. 

“She did.” The words fall from Jon’s lips like snowflakes – soft, incriminating, weighty for all that they dissolve into nothingness.

Gendry’s incredulous raised brows are enough of an answer. He had not known this; for all the letters that they exchanged between their winter strongholds, there were two people they did not speak of, two ghosts that their letters did not invite into their stories. It has started out intentional, but he can’t remember the last time he wanted to mention Arya. He can’t remember the last time he heard a wolf howling in the night and thought of a dangerous wisp of a weapon instead of the girl with fire in her hair and sapphires for eyes.

“I didn’t deserve it,” Jon nearly sneers, continuing, drinking more mead and slamming the mug onto the table between them. There is a darkness in his eyes, shadowy and tinged with doubt – still, even now, after years beyond the wall. He had wondered if the man would find peace out there. Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t, but it is obvious that Sansa’s reaction to his arrival has thrown him off-kilter.

“She wanted you there,” Gendry says, lowly, watching the way Jon’s eyes flicker up to his. He ignores the question on the other man’s face, the one that has just begun to ponder the depth of friendship between his friend and his cousin.

Despite that he was there, that he came as soon as she needed him, that she did not have to write and pardon him and beg him to return - 

“I didn’t deserve it,” Jon repeats, lower still. A grumble of self-loathing, of a sensitive wound around his heart that may never heal.

“No,” Gendry says softly, almost masked by the sounds of soldiers shouting to each other outside. “But she did.”

\---

Sansa strides out of the council tent, across the way and into her own, where she stands, staring into nothing, until her hands have stopped shaking. Until she can take a full breath. Until she is not trapped in the memory of sinking to her knees in the harbor of King’s Landing, over and over again, until it is just another dance that she once knew but has long since forgotten.

She feels as though her heart is made of stone, leaden in her chest and somehow not beating for this man she had wanted, desperately. Wanted him to return her love, fervently.

(But all the love that she could have offered could not have counterbalanced the hate he held in his heart for himself, close as a lover and twice as beguiling. It took her two years to come to terms with the thought, it is no surprise that his actual appearance is jarring).

The man she had wept for, threatened to go to war for, had stayed up all night stitching a new cloak by dim candlelight for – he is in front of her, once more. A dark cloak had been draped over his shoulders and she knows at once, someone else has stitched it together. Maybe Tormund, as much as the idea makes her lips twitch with laugher, or perhaps some woman up beyond the wall; she cannot bring herself to think about it, cannot bring herself to care. His grey eyes were familiar, and yet, it was like looking at a stranger. She had loved him once, she knows that, but she cannot convince her heart to beat again, cannot convince her pulse to race.

She looked at him and was unmoved. 

He left. He sailed away from her not once, but twice. It is a truth she has accepted, much as she fought it; this is a man who leaves her. This is a man who is devoted to the good and the right and will think of her only second. Whatever he held for her in his heart, it was not enough. She thinks, quietly, in a shadowed part of her, that she is glad nothing was confessed between them, during the time before. There are no memories of kisses to forget, no fond remembrances of embraces or declarations – only the sharp ache of longing, of unrequited hopes. And those faded much more quickly.

Sansa wraps her arms around herself as best she can with one arm in a sling, inhales deeply, and goes to find Brienne. The lady knight is teaching her to spar; she could desperately use some distraction, at the moment, as she considers the man she once loved and the man she may very well come to love are now together.

Gendry’s eyes had flashed in anger as Jon entered the tent, brushed aside in favor of an easy smile for his friend. But she had seen, and known, and felt that familiar bitterness. _They left_. She would feel the same if Arya ever returned.

She and Gendry, they were the ones left behind. She refuses to feel guilty for their friendship, for the way his touch makes her feel alive and warm and full of girlish laughter. Refuses to regret the tentative courtship they have been constructing in the daytime, nor the fierce way they come together each night.

She refuses to feel guilty, she feels guilty nevertheless. Her shades haunt her always.

She picks up the dagger, and walks out of her tent. 

\---

Gendry does not come to her, that night.

He has visited her every night since the first battle, no matter the hour, the state of their injuries, the duties they must attend.

But he has not come to her.

Sansa paces her tent that night after Minisia has braided her hair and turned down the furs with a knowing glance, wondering and waiting and glancing at the opening, over and over again.

She waits impatiently as the camp quiets, as the horses settle, as the only sounds are soldiers gathered around fires, telling stories of the people waiting for them to return.

Finally, she can’t wait for one moment longer. She won’t. The moon is high in the sky when Sansa wraps her dressing gown tight around her waist and throws a cloak over her gleaming braid, making her way through the camp until she reaches her destination, and slips inside the tent, relieved to find he is alone. 

Gendry is sitting by the fire, bare chest gleaming as he whittles away at a small piece of wood in his hands, carving and sculpting some creature or another. She has seen him do it on several occasions, but never with the contemplative look in his eyes that she sees as she steps softly into his perimeter.

His shoulders tense, she watches his hand go to the dagger at his side, before she quickly lowers her hood and steps towards him, feet light as a cat, and he lets out a groan, rubbing his face with his hand as he stands to greet her. 

“Warn a man next time, won’t you, Sans?”

It is odd, she thinks, the way he is standing, but it takes her a moment to place why it feels so strange. When they are alone, they touch; when they sit side-by-side, his fingertips will trace hers beneath the table; when they discuss positions of warriors over endless maps, he will carefully brush the small of her back as he walks by. But this time, this night - he does not touch her, does not reach for her. Has not reached for her since this morning.

There is a question in his eyes; she knows, suddenly, why he did not come. Why his hands remain at his side, fidgeting around the wooden figurine, around the dagger in his other hand. Why his gaze glances off of her own, lingering on the corners of her dressing gown, on the edges of her silhouette.

They do not speak about what is between them – she cannot decide if it is because they are too frightened of the depths of their feelings or too familiar with the losses of war. For all that she has loved songs and tales of grand love and great adventure, she does not have the words to reassure him, to give voice to the song inside her heart, to the drum-beats that beat only for him.

Instead, she lets her cloak fall to the floor.

Instead, she slowly unties the dressing gown at her waist, dragging it across her stomach and shrugging it off of her shoulders, until she is standing, bare before him. She is covered in shadows, but her eyes gleam as they look up into his, as he swallows heavily and licks his lips, as he drops the figurine and lays the dagger on the small table and steps towards her.

The gleam in his eyes is one she recognizes, the grin on his lips matches her own – dark and demanding and enraptured. 

He stands just before her, close enough that she can feel his breath on her forehead, the heat emanating from him, the waves of desire in his eyes. His hand traces up the side of her thigh and slips into the cradle of her waist, rubbing his thumb against her ribs as his other hand finds purchase in her hair, tilting her head up and her lips up to meet his.

For all his hesitance earlier, it is a demanding kiss, possessive and insistent. Sansa is relieved, somehow, at the way he molds to her body, the eagerness of his hands and the push-pull of his lips that leaves her breathless. He still wants her – it is a refrain that she will sing to herself over and over again, until she remembers it is true.

They have made no promises – but they have this. Searing kisses press into the curve of her collarbone and her eyes flutter closed as she thinks about proof of concept, about the imprint of his fingertips on the soft flesh of her inner thigh, the pattern of marks his kisses and teeth leave down her body, the way they seem to echo a sentiment he has not yet voiced: _mine mine mine. _

She pushes him towards the pile of furs in the corner of the tent, closest to the firelight. He is surprised, but stares up at her, worship in his eyes even as his hands move towards the tie of his trousers. _Yours_, she aches to answer – but instead, she runs her hands from her hipbones up to her breasts and laughs darkly as he groans, working ever faster to disrobe.

Instead, she bends to her knees and crawls towards him, all too aware of her nudity, all too aware of his eyes, locked on her face, as a coy smiles plays about her lips. It takes but a moment to take him in hand, to straddle him yet another moment, and yet she takes her time sinking down onto him – stretching that moment out into blissful eternity, letting her eyes flutter closed as she listens to the stuttering groan emanating from his mouth, his hands hovering over her hips.

“Sansa,” he murmurs, “I-“

She can’t help it, she leans down to kiss him, to steal the words from his mouth, for whatever he is about to say, she does not want to hear it, not now. 

They come together twice that night, dozing lightly then reaching for each other again, legs intertwined and glimmering with sweat. Sansa is nearly asleep when she feels his lips press against her forehead, when she feels him pull the furs over them to guard against the chill of the spring nights, when she hears him say, “I thought you might want him, again.”

_Only you, _she thinks, but does not say, before she falls asleep in his arms. _Only you_.

Why else would she have come?

\---

Jon’s fingers clench around the ale in his hands as he sits in the candlelight of the tent, on the periphery, watching the people he knows and trusts best work to plan a way to get out of this war that none of them wanted. He sets his gaze upon Gendry and Sansa, perched next to each other on a wooden bench in front of the map, murmuring quietly as they gesture over the shadowed sketches.

He is bewildered by the camaraderie between them, the way they sit together in council meetings, side by side – as if they, as if they were a ruling couple, a queen and king in all but name. They barely touch, speak to each other in a friendly tone, and yet he feels something between them. Something heavier, something with more power.

But just the day before, towards the end of yet another skirmish, a spear found its mark and grazed the side of the queen, ripping through her gown, finding its place underneath the armor she wore. He had not known, _no one_ had known, and Jon had only stood by and watched in horror as she had dismounted her horse, wincing, and immediately slumped to the ground, unconscious, the red of her blood staining the new grass. Iara had whinnied in distress, and Brienne had darted to her side; Jon had never seen anyone move so fast, with eyes so frantic. Gendry had wheeled his horse around upon seeing her fall, but after noticing that Brienne was helping her off the battlefield, he set his jaw and turned back into the fray.

She had been taken care of quickly, she was _alright_, that was the important thing – but what was, perhaps, more significant, was the look on Gendry’s face as he prowled his way to her tent across the camp. He had checked on his injured, his wounded, taken care of his horse – then stormed across the encampment to the billowing doors of her tent, blown this way and that by the wind.

Jon had attempted to stop the man, to throw out an arm and plead in defense of her modesty – the healer had murmured to him that the queen was not quite clothed for company - but his efforts were for naught.

Gendry had stilled, the light in his eyes promethean as he growled at Jon, shoulders broad and teeth bared: “Get the _fuck_ out of my way.”

The menacing man with bristled shoulders, blood still streaked across his face, plunged into the tent, already yelling at the redheaded woman on the bed, scolding her for not telling him of a weakness in her armor, for going out on that battlefield again and again, for putting herself at risk. Jon hadn’t been able to help himself and had trailed after him, ready to defend Sansa – but she had yelled right back at the man, teeth bared and hair wild.

But then, it was over as soon as it began.

Gendry clenched his jaw, then collapsed in the chair next to her bed, cradling her hand in his, bowing his forehead in reverence, in deference to this almost-loss, this not-quite-devastation.

“Don’t do that to me again, alright?”

Sansa sighed, and brought her hand up to the side of his face, not minding the blood or the sweat. “Alright,” she said, the look on her face soft and fond and kind. 

Jon wishes he could say does not understand those words. Jon had wondered why that sounded like a declaration, a confession, a heart set to beat once more, but he knows, of course he does. It had suddenly felt as though he were intruding, and he left to wander the camp for hours, scouting out the neighboring woods, before he is able to settle the restless feeling in his gut.

It is what he thought they could be. He had dreamed of matching furs, snow-capped sigils hanging from stone walls, the warmth of her hand tucked into the crook of his elbow as they glided through the great hall. It had been a bastard’s dream – belonging, love, a new beginning. 

It is what he gave up. He had known, as soon as he set foot on Dragonstone, that he was giving it up. Most days, he couldn’t tell if he was more furious at himself for letting honor guide him and fail the people of King’s Landing, or for knowing what he would be giving up – that chance of her, the idea of auburn hair splayed across his pillow, her soft touch at the palm of his hand – and stepping on the boat regardless.

For all the love in his heart had not been enough to keep him there, to stay with her. 

So he extinguishes the hope he had been cradling since returning with his men, soft and tender and achingly cautious. He abandons all thoughts of the two of them, of what they might have been.

He forgives himself, for all that he has done, for all that he never did – and swallows all of his half-considered confessions.

\---

“Your Grace?” Minisia peers around the tent flap one morning, face stained red – whether from the cold or whatever conversation is on her mind, Sansa doesn’t know. She gestures her in anyway with a warm smile.

“Yes, Minisia?” Some part of Sansa hopes that Minisia will confess to her adoration of sweet Podrick. She watches the way he looks at her beneath his lashes, as if he were the coltish maid and she the courting male. 

Minisia twists her hands together, before blurting it out. “Do you have need of moon tea?”

The letter in Sansa’s hand falls to the table in shock. “I – I beg your pardon?”

“Moon tea, your grace, it keeps women –“

“I know what it does, Minisia,” Sansa snaps, though there is no bite to it. Any thought of a babe growing in her belly had faded long ago, with Ramsay. The offer of moon tea… it is a reminder that she has lost something she hadn’t even been able to dream about, not yet, not fully. Not ever, now.

“My apologies,” Minisia dips into a low curtsy, face flushed, but Sansa steps out from her desk and catches her lady’s hand.

“No, I’m sorry,” Sansa says, quietly. “It is a good question. I thank you for asking it.” The smile she offers is a brittle one, tempered by years and months of dreams just out of reach. “I won’t be needing moon tea. I was told by the maesters long ago that no babe will take root in my belly.”

It is why there is a document in Brienne’s keeping of her succession plan, for the North, of who it should pass to. First, Jon, of course – though he will refuse, then a ruling council will elect one of her three nominations – Lady Karstark’s eldest girl, sensible and kind, Ser Cregan’s second son, brave and bold and earnest, or Ser Dilhe’s only daughter, wise beyond her years and fierce as the North itself.

She does not speak of the endless dreams - dreams sent by the gods to torment her, dreams of auburn heads ducking around the corner at Winterfell, the soft echoes of tiny feet along the winding halls. She does not think of running her hands across her barren stomach, having long since repressed the ache of longing.

When she dreams now, it is reminiscent of the dreams she had as a girl, just before her journey to King’s Landing: dark muzzle, pounding feet, and the crisp scent of a clearing in the moonlight. Wolves howl, in her dreams.

It takes her a while to understand that others hear them, too.

Occasionally, Sansa wakes, panting, a hand clutching at her throat as she sits straight up in bed. She does not wish to remember those dreams, but she cannot help herself. A dark-winged dragon, wheeling in the sky. Ravens upon ravens upon ravens, perched in the branches of an ancient tree. Her blood-stained palms against the heart tree.

Gendry asks her once, sleepily, if she wanted to talk about her dreams; she presses her lips to his brow for asking, but curls up underneath the shadow of him once more and shakes her head. She wants to win this war, she wants to live a peaceful life, she wants to give the North to whoever deserves it, to whoever earns the hearts of the people. 

That is all, she tells herself.

(She lies).

In some small place of her heart, hidden away, she desperately does not want to be parted from this man. She wants to dream of blue eyes and dark hair and hope for nothing more.

When she wakes again in the hazy dawn light, his hand is draped across her waist, just above the curve of her stomach. As a girl she would rest her hand in that exact spot, wondering how it would feel to swell, to feel a babe kicking at her from the inside, to nurture and grow a family. As a young woman, she would press the heel of her hand to the spot to lessen the monthly aches. As a married woman, twice over, her hands were constantly crossed over her belly in protection, supplication to whatever gods were listening, please no, not with this man, please.

In the early morning, she closes her eyes and shifts in his arms until she is facing him, his hand curled over her back. Her fingertips trace the rough edge of his face, the soft curves of his lips.

Nothing more, she insists to herself, than this.

\---

Weeks pass, battles rage, and Jon is between them as a bruise, a comfort, a friend, a cousin. Sansa isn’t sure how to talk to him and so tends to avoid him altogether. She watches as Gendry falls easily back into the rapport that they had between them, in the war before. She wonders if there will ever be a time after the war, if he will ever be at peace, at rest.

Sansa drinks deeply from her ale, and raises a toast to Jon across the campfire, watching the fire flicker in his light eyes and knowing, without having to say a word, that he is thinking of the day she arrived at Castle Black. The soup they supped on together, the ale they shared, the forgiveness between them. Between the warmth of her memories and the heat of the fire, she is tempted to forgive him everything, anything. She aches to look at him and feel the simple longing of long ago, rather than this complicated beast that has taken root in her breast.

The beast that roars of guilt and unfulfilled promises and a fury so deep that she has never dared to give it voice, for fear it would overtake her completely.

Sansa sighs. Fury has never given her anything, only the feeling of helplessness at the end of the night, a slave to her emotions. So she sighs and moves to sit next to her brother-cousin, clinking her mug against his and offering him a smile.

“Sansa,” he says in greeting, rough voice even harsher for the remnants of the long battle against the Tyrell forces that week. A victory, but hard won, and she was very, very tired of hard-won victories. She reminds herself they fight for peace, but the sentiment seems more trite with every letter she writes to a woman up North who has lost her son, her husband, her father.

“Jon,” she nods in return.

There is a silence between them that ought to have been tense, but – perhaps it was the exhaustion, the years that had passed, the way her eyes searched the darkness for a familiar gaze of blue – it was comfortable. It spoke of wounds healing.

“Forgive me?” she asks, her tone similar to that night from years ago, but her eyes mournful. 

A smile stretches across his face, genuine and free. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

And this time, when he says it, she believes him.

And this time, he asks for her forgiveness as well, which she grants.

And this time, Sansa and Jon gather around the fire with Podrick and Brienne and Davos and Tormund and drink mugs of ale until their bellies ache from laughing, until tears stream from their eyes, until all of the bawdy songs have been sung – forwards, backwards, and with new verses creatively added.

It is late that evening when Gendry finds them, the wound in his arm having been stitched up at the last – Jon’s head in Sansa’s lap as she argues with Podrick over some nonsense or another that has them both laughing like he’d never seen her laugh before.

Sansa’s eyes dart to his and it is not guilt he sees, but elation. The joy is etched in every line of her face, and he cannot help but to beam in return at this clumsy, loose-fingered woman with her circlet askew on her forehead. He cannot help himself, and gingerly seats himself beside her, feeling the warmth of her body against his own.

She reaches out and without hesitation, without a thought, without a pause in her conversation with Podrick, intertwines her fingers with his, rubbing her thumb against the slope of his hand. It is more of a public declaration than they have ever dared, and he steadfastly ignores his first instinct to snatch his hand away, to keep whatever is between them just between them, and far from prying eyes.

Speaking of prying eyes… his eyes dart, quickly, to where Davos and Brienne are slouched, carefully not looking at him but so transparent in their observation that he wishes they would just stare, head-on.

His second instinct is to press his lips to her temple, to drag her away and into his bed, giggling all the while, before he lays next to her and lets her count every freckle and every scar, before they fall asleep together and rise together and everyone _knows _they are together, most of all his damned friend, her sleepy drunk of a cousin-brother, head perched in her lap.

The thrumming in his veins is a dare, is a tangible creature, humming and swaying just out of reach, begging for him to just _do _something.

Instead, he sits.

He fixates on the feel of her hand in his.

He listens to the howling of wolves and the telling of stories until Sansa, too, is half-asleep, and he carefully carries her to her tent, mindful of the wound across his arm, before tucking the furs tightly around her heavy limbs. Only the semblance of propriety, of a secret that he is no longer sure is kept between them, only the suggestion of restraint forces him to leave her tent, to shuffle across to his own, to collapse onto his pile of furs and ache for the woman he left behind. He even wishes to wake with her hair in his mouth, if only she would be next to him.

He is tired of secrets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter upload date is a little uncertain - we just got a new puppy (!!!) and are doing some traveling with my family over the holiday season - but i will try to update on my tumblr about the writing status. we are approaching a more nebulous part of this fic, but i'm excited about some interactions in these next bits! as always, thanks for following along! would love any feedback!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for those curious: the puppy is very cute. the puppy is also basically a fluffy thornbush.  
and for those who are particularly observant: i did up the chapter count by one. might go up one more - we shall see! 
> 
> i'm hitting my final semester of graduate school (!!!!!) this next week (?!?!) so i will do my very best to keep on schedule to finish this baby (because it is my baby, i love this fic so much) in the next month or so. 
> 
> thanks, as always, for reading along <3

Dark wings bring dark words. Isn’t that what Father always used to say? It’s been so long, Sansa can hardly remember who said it, from whose lips the token wisdom fell.

It doesn’t necessarily surprise her, but she can’t help the bitterness of disappointment that swells in her throat as she reads the raven’s letters. At least when what remains of the Lannisters decide to side with the Tyrells and their ilk, they do it openly. Dorne, apparently, has pretended neutrality and supplied soldiers and gear and food for the last months.

Sansa swallows the heaviness in her throat and stands, moving to talk to her commanding team, shoulders tense as she thinks about the victories they are so proud of; false hopes, all of them, and false starts. Luring them to safety, to this intersection of road, only to be trampled by more soldiers than she had thought possible. King’s Landing may have been destroyed by dragonfire, but Dorne had not, nor had the Iron Islands.

“Minisia, would you gather the commanders?” she asks the young woman in front of her, her messenger of bad news, her companion on this long journey away from the comforting walls of Winterfell. Minisia nods, she offers her a grateful smile, before turning towards the center of the camp. The numbers tally in her head as she strides to the tent, eyes glazed enough that she misses the look Jon exchanges with Gendry, as they both fall in line behind her, abandoning their tasks at the broken urgency in her eyes.

“Alright, Sansa?” Jon murmurs, as they near the tent.

She nods without looking at him. She _had_ been alright, or almost, and she will not allow herself to be desolate until she has figured out a solution, a path forward, when it feels as though they are trapped on all sides. Judging by the scout’s reports that she rifles through once she reaches the tent, the expression is not simply metaphorical.

Sansa leans her head into her hands. She rubs her temples. She sighs.

Jon and Gendry sit on either side of her, silent and patient.

“I am so tired of war,” she says, finally. She is exhausted to her very bones, barely keeping her eyes open at supper. She had attributed to her nighttime activities with Gendry but she muses that she can better blame the war, the endless days and endless deaths and planning and maneuvering and she is _tired_.

There is nothing they can say that doesn’t sound trite, so they stay silent, though Gendry reaches out a hand to entangle with her own, steadfastly ignoring Jon’s gaze. Sansa rubs her thumb absentmindedly over the back of his palm for a moment, offering him a grateful glance, then pulls her hand back into her lap, twisting her fingers round and round until the entire group has arrived.

The commanders and her generals gather quickly – she has never called for them, not like this. Not urgently, not in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, with no battle on the horizon, no victory celebration to be had.

She hates to be so transparent in her desire for help.

“Your Grace?” Brienne is the first to come into the tent, noting at once the defeated posture of her queen.

Sansa straightens her shoulders, and blinks away tears. “Yes, Brienne?”

“Is everything alright?”

Sansa cannot bring herself to offer a smile, and Brienne nods in response, recognizing the look on her face. Betrayed, once more.

They sit around her at the table – far too young, all of them, to be fighting inherited wars and inherited grudges, passed down through the generations. If they had done it right, years ago, at the council, or even decades before that after the first rebellion, perhaps they would know peace. She wonders how many letters she will write, by the end of this, to how many mothers, to how many wives, to how many daughters. How many children will grow up never knowing the shadow of their father’s shoulders in the doorway?

“We are at a disadvantage,” she says, words that she would never say to anyone else but her most trusted. Gendry sits next to her, carefully not touching her but close enough to offer warmth, condolence, strength. “Dorne has lent their aid to the Tyrells – supplies, men, horses. They have been counting on our distraction to pin us here, in this very spot.”

Ser Cregan curses softly. Ser Dilhe leans forward onto his elbows and runs his hands through his dark curls. The rest, they look to her, as they have looked to her for guidance these past years, awaiting her path forward. She is ashamed she has nothing for them, no matter how she has turned the situation over and over again in her mind. Her next words are soft, but seem to echo in the tent.

“We are surrounded, we are running out of supplies, we are exhausted from weeks of small skirmishes. I… I don’t know how to move forward.”

They sit in silence for several long, excruciating moments, until Jon lifts his head. “I may have an idea.”

\---

The council talks deep into the night, and by the time they depart her tent, the candles have burned down low - so low that she almost misses the look Jon gives Gendry as he leaves. It is curious to her, and she is grateful, that there is no malice in it. Only a gentle threat, from a cousin-brother who may have loved her, long ago, and loves her still, though differently, with less torment: _Take care of her_.

Sansa nearly scoffs. As if she is some delicate creature, a fourteen-year old girl who sings her ballads and dreams of love and true knights. As if she has not, for years and years, taken care of herself.

Besides, she thinks, as a small grin plays across her features, the look on Gendry's face promises that he will, _certainly_, take care of her. His eyes gleam in the candlelight as he saunters towards her. His gaze is dark, and wanting, and beneath it all - a tenderness, a care. A fondness that she is hesitant to put a name to, even now. Even now that they have confessed their hearts in a thousand other ways, other words.

Words fail her, besides, when she considers how he is a fixture at her side. That she only need reach out in the night, and he is there, wrapping her within his broad arms. That her gaze can flicker to his to share a private laugh, when Brienne sits next to Tormund and the man tenses, every inch of him fearful and delighted. That she may sit beside him at her council table, and know that he will look upon her with the respect of one royal to another, of one warrior to another.

It is simple, and it is true, and it is anything but easy: her heart belongs to him.

Sansa considers herself to be brave, now, after all she has endured, after every battle she has raced headlong into, afraid but charging ahead. But she will not consider confessing what he means to her, too afraid of the possibilities of what is to come: either one of them could die in battle, or they may lose, or he may choose to love another (a wisp of a girl with short, dark hair dances into her mind and she swallows her guilt heavily).

(She used to think of Arya near-constantly, when she and Gendry first started to exchange letters. But as the days passed, and the letters grew longer, her shame was reduced to almost nothing. She had left them, and he had stayed, and Sansa had found a friend in him. Is it any wonder that he became something more, to her? That he became near everything?)

She shakes off her fears and rises to greet him as he walks towards her. 

"You alright?" he asks, lowly, raising her hands to his mouth and pressing soft kisses to her palms.

Sansa nods, a gentle smile playing on her lips as she brings a hand to grasp his jaw. His warmth is as comforting as the hearth, as enduring as the embers. Is it any wonder she wants to stay close to him always?

If anyone can offer her comfort now, in this time of uncertainty, it will be Gendry. She lifts on her toes to press her lips to his, allowing his kisses to lure her into oblivion, into the bliss of forgetting. She would trust no one else, with this. 

\---

Wolves join them, more and more each day, until almost every dozen men has a snarling wolf accompanying them, all teeth and shoulders and bristling fur. Sansa vacillates wildly between worrying about what they will eat and longing for her direwolf from decades past. Luckily, they scavenge for their own food. And though her eyes search for wolves that stand above the rest, she finds nothing familiar in their companions.

It was a relief, somehow, when they started to arrive. Jon’s plan is a good one, it’s true. But there is something terrifying about their eyes, glinting in the darkness, the broad shoulders, the rough fur matted with blood around their muzzles as they polish off a rabbit or two in the evenings, next to the fire. The men have slowly become more comfortable with them – though it was easier for the wildlings, by far, who were much more used to wild things and wild creatures living in harmony with them. Cows and horses don’t compare much to snarling snouts and sharp teeth.

Sansa is fairly relaxed around them, almost condescendingly so. She thinks, quietly, privately, that they are lovely and ferocious but they aren’t _direwolves_.

Until one day, a wolf whose shoulders reach her own strides into camp – muzzle covered in blood, dark eyes glistening. The murmurs reach Sansa before the wolf does, and she steps outside of her tent to greet the massive beast.

Brienne’s hand darts to the pommel of her sword as Sansa reaches a hand out, palm open – a peace offering or an overture of friendliness, she can’t say for sure. Brienne remains tense as the queen and beast look at each other, sizing each other up, for all that they stand the same height. This is the first time in years that Brienne has been unsure of her steps forward, has thought she might die for this, defending this woman, and that she wouldn’t regret it, but _gods_, but she’d kill to have Jaime here at her back once more.

Tormund steps up beside her, slowly as to not draw the wolf’s attention, his shoulders equally drawn and brow furrowed as he watches them, as he watches her, waiting for her signal.

The wolf nudges her snout into the queen’s hand, and a soft smile blooms on Sansa’s face. “Hello, Nymeria,” she says.

Sansa’s smile grows at Tormund’s chuckle of relief, at the lowering of Brienne’s shoulders.

“You…you know this wolf?” Podrick is the one brave enough to ask; Brienne shoots him a disapproving look, having long believed that the people she serves have a right to their own lives, their own secrets. If the queen is peculiarly good at communing with giant beasts, let that be of her own concern. 

“She’s the closest thing to my sister on this earth,” Sansa says, and it is simple even as she realizes it makes no sense to the people around her. She steps even closer, burrowing her face into the wolf’s soft neck fur, thick and luxurious and matted with mud.

The grand, beautiful beast tucks her neck underneath her legs, clamping her jaw around something and bringing it forward, into Sansa’s arms. She doesn’t realize it’s a wolf pup until it’s squirming in her arms, all too-long legs and a whimpering snout and cold nose and ears that don’t quite manage to stay up, not yet, and she doesn’t realize she’s weeping until the pup licks her cheeks.

She looks nothing like Lady; her fur is dark red, dark enough to appear brown except as the weak sunlight highlights the fur of her back, and she is rambunctious and bouncy and eager. She woofs softly into Sansa’s hair, bites her ear, then wiggles until she is forced to let the pup down onto the grass.

Sansa has no sooner raised her head in question to the direwolf in front of her, brow arched, than the wolf bows her massive head and presses forward, against the waist of Sansa’s gown. An answer, a hope, an acknowledgement of something she hadn’t even known was _possible_ let alone -

Sansa’s head roars; it feels as though thousands of insects have taken up lodging between her ears and she sways on her feet in disbelief.

“My lady?” Brienne steps forward, a hand outstretched towards her elbow.

Sansa waves off her concern, offering a small smile to Brienne, one learnt in a court long ago, made of falsehoods and stitched together with just enough sincerity to ward off suspicion. She had learned it well and used it often, but she hadn’t used it in years. 

Her heart aches as she uses it once more, on her closest friend.

“I plan to talk a walk with this scoundrel,” Sansa says fondly, ignoring the trembling of her hands as she crouches next to the pup and scratches the floppy ears.

“I’ll accompany you,” Brienne immediately replies, though she is rebuffed just as quick – gently, calmly, with an affectionate look towards the giant direwolf still standing in front of her.

“Nymeria will keep me safe.” 

Brienne and Tormund exchange looks as the queen wanders into the woods, the pup yipping and jumping around her ankles, followed by two lumbering direwolves, paws heavy in the soft dirt.

\---

Arya had been surprised, at first, at all of the new ways her hands could form callouses. Training with her sword had given her several, but they were so scarred and so constant in her life that she had forgotten how painful it had been to form them. Learning to sail a ship had granted her many more.

The ship had sailed from King’s Landing and before the sun had set on the first day, she had tucked her formal clothing into her cabin – folding it carefully, mindful of Sansa’s careful stitches – and jumped eagerly into the workings of the crew. Hoisting the sail, rowing, scrubbing the deck on her knees – it is difficult work. It is back-breaking and callous-forming and she is too exhausted to think. Too exhausted to dream, even.

For when she dreams, it is of bodies and burning and screams.

When she dreams, it is of her little brother, left all alone in the city of desolation and vipers. Her sister, sitting on the throne where her eldest brother once sat, walking the halls where she had been tormented by the worst man. And Jon, exiled and banished and in the wilderness of his mind, that _dumb_ contrite look on his face for all of time.

(Once, she had dreamed of a man with ash smeared across his face, with eyes that nearly glowed in the light of the forge, who protected her and held her. Occasionally, she thinks of how he asked her to stay.

She doesn’t regret her answer, not even when she is sleeping by herself under the stars, with only her hands and her thoughts to keep her company in the darkness when she awakes).

Arya relishes the work. The muscles in her arms tire less, and she is able to work on her training – walking with whisper-soft footprints across the side of the deck, swinging her sword in a careful rhythm that Syrio once taught her, that the waif beat into her, over and over again.

Her body becomes a tool once more, and she is glad for it.

Months pass, the years trickle by – and she measures time by the length of her braid, growing longer down her back until it is reminiscent of her lady mother, of her sister. The braids have become neater by necessity, by practice, by the hours she spends each night when the labor of the day is done, working and re-working her braids until they are as close to perfect as Sansa’s ever were.

She has seen much of the world and its strange workings. A stone that seemed to glow from within, trees that seemed to grow into each other with flowers that bloomed each morning. A whisper of a dragon, a sighting of a ghost. Assassins and courtesans and royalty, she’d met them all. Befriended some, run from others like hellfire was at her heels after causing mischief. There had even been a few she had adored, men and women alike.

And still, she sails to the next city, she explores a new horizon, she searches ever farther, ever faster as she gets better and better at sailing, at trying on new accents and languages and skills. She has learned to shuck oysters, to catch fish with a spear, to climb trees to peel berries from the highest limbs. The day she learned to stitch a wound with careful, precise movements, she laughed through the pain. The scar on her leg would always remind her of her sister and her perfect stitches, even as hers were trembling. 

She can’t stay still. (Idle hands let her mind wander. She hates it).

But two years of trying to distract herself from the nightmares, to run away, to see what’s west of Westeros - and she can’t do it anymore. Her dreams find her, and she lets them. The thoughts that used to haunt her, they linger like old friends and she does not fear them, not any longer. She welcomes their presence and puzzles over them until she has found meaning or they have lost all meaning or both. She sits in her cabin and she is at peace. 

Two years after she sailed from King’s Landing, they dock at the port of a big city, where a messenger is awaiting her: with dark curls braided back from her tanned face, and a belly halfway out into her hands. The woman reports that the world is at war once more. Arya is furious at the folly of men – but her sister is fighting, and her brother has need of her. 

There is only one place she can go, now.

The rest of the world can wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> edit: next chapter's update is a little bit behind schedule. hopefully next sunday (1/26) i'll be updating! also i changed a scene after uploading this because it just didn't seem to fit quite right


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry for the delay in updating & i SO appreciate your patience and all of your lovely, wonderful, encouraging feedback. it really means the world to me and helps me to keep writing when exhaustion calls. 
> 
> longest chapter yet! & it is 25% Bran and 100% FEELINGS 
> 
> hope you enjoy :)

Bran can’t shake the grin that stretches across his face as he throws his arms out wide, feeling the edges of the sky dance in his fingertips. Meera’s hands grip onto his waist from behind, squeezing tightly in warning, but he only reaches up higher, whooping joyously as the dragon drops and Meera shrieks before exploding into laughter.

There is so much happiness between them, now. Undeserved, perhaps, but he hoards it, aware that at any moment it may disappear entirely. He had been the three-eyed raven for so long that now, freed of its gift, he is remembering how it is just to be himself, again. To be Bran, just Bran. To feel, again. It is a kind of liberty that he will not take for granted.

When the Night King fell, and the white-walkers crumbled into dust, Bran’s visions doubled; the new ones were brighter, softer, kinder, and entrancing in a way that tasted of a hope he had long forgotten. They spoke of the children of the forest, the gift they had once bestowed, the gift that they – beseechingly, pleadingly – asked to be returned to them. They had never meant for the children of man to keep it for so long.

Bran agreed – easily, willingly, within seconds of them asking – and immediately felt his shoulders lift. He would help to maneuver the last pieces into motion, to ready this part of the world for the next stanza, then he would journey to find them, slash his palms and press his hands into theirs. And then, his body could be his own again.

His life, his _heart_ could be his own again.

It was, arguably, the easiest _yes_ that had ever fallen from his lips.

He would have said yes even faster, offered his palms to them _years_ ago, had he known who would walk through his door.

A few weeks after the Long Night, Bran had a rare moment of solitude in his chambers, surveying the desolation outside with clear eyes and a heaviness in his shoulders. Could he have done something more to prevent this? Could he have saved more lives, prevented more deaths? Was there a world where they never would have gotten to this point – where Ned Stark lived and Catelyn Stark laughed and Arya did not become a warrior and Sansa did not endure everything she never should have?

Was there a world where his brothers still lived?

But this moment of contemplation was wrecked by a petite woman with dark hair, swathed in layers of furs. She had stormed into the room, throwing open the door, shoulders tense and ready for a fight - before stopping short, the look in his eyes familiar, from long, long before.

“Meera,” he breathed, turning his chair to face her, eyes alight. Bran had wanted, more than anything, to stand and run to her, to take her in his arms. But she had never seen him stand, anyway.

“I had –“ she stumbled over her words, taken aback at the warmth in his tone, “I had to see if you were alive.”

“You came back,” he said, wonderingly, even as he reached his hand out for her own.

“I had to.” The words spilled from her mouth helplessly, softly, as if she hadn’t really had a choice. But she had, and she had chosen him and she had come through the darkness and the wilderness and all that terror for _him_. Her hand found his own, fingertips tentative before he grasped her and pulled her into his lap with a firm tug.

Bran buried his face into her hair, wrapped his arms around her waist, and breathed in. If he hadn’t been assured of his promise before, if there had been any lingering doubts, they disappeared in the wake of her, in the feel of the woman he loved in his arms. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. 

Meera pulled back, brows high in surprise, searching his face. “Bran?”

“For everything,” he said, softly, watching her face transform from wary to furious.

“Oh, now you’re sorry?” She attempted to pull away from him, to stand, but his arms remained wound around her waist. “Where was that apology when- Bran! Let me _go_!”

“No,” he said, quietly. A promise, a solemn vow. “Not ever again.” But his hands loosened, in case she meant it, in case she needed space. He hoped for forgiveness, but didn’t believe he deserved it, and certainly not so soon. Not from this whirlwind of a woman who he had loved as a boy and now, as a young man on the precipice of a new life, of a life worth living.

True to form, Meera had stood from him, wavering on her feet, before storming out and slamming the door.

But she came back.

Again and again, day in and day out.

Bran had kept her a secret from the world, and more importantly, from his sisters. From Daenerys. From Jon. It is easy to keep a secret when no one looks at you anymore, not really – when no one sees the glint in your eyes and dares to look closer, rather than backing away. It was disconcerting, to exist and yet to be forgotten.

Hidden in plain sight, Meera accompanied them to the capital, to that wretched council, to the castle marred by scorch marks and the endless stench of death. Bran hated it. He hated the crown placed heavily on his brow, the title he earned – Bran the Broken – for it sometimes felt like it was all his fault, really, that he had broken so much where he had meant to _build_ and renew and –

Easy to get lost, he would think, in the pointlessness of it all. King, queen, rebellions, death – the wheel turns evermore.

Without the greensight, he found he was rather sick of the whole thing. He felt a craving to run, to find adventure. There was only one more thing to do, one more vision to fulfill.

So Meera had helped to sneak them out of the castle in the early morning hours, one hand protectively over the slight swell of her stomach – god, hadn’t _that _been a surprise to them both – and they went looking first for the children of the forest, to fulfill his promise, and then for a dark-winged beast, a dragon that had departed in search of higher ground.

Bran had to know. He had to know if she was really dead. And some part of him, a boy’s part of his heart, some long-lost flicker of memory, said that Rickon would have wanted to know if the last dragon on the earth was dead or alive. And so they searched.

And so they _found_.

Losing the greensight had been disorienting for a few days, like shedding his skin in favor of a new body – but the gift of warging, that gift from his ancestors and the Stark line and all that was Northern, that _flourished_ in the absence of the raven’s curse. Communicating with the dragon – that poor, depressed creature – had been easy, once he got brave enough to approach on wheels too slow to run away. Convincing him to eat had been more difficult, and then to realize that there could be life, could be purpose after Dany – the most difficult thing he’d ever done.

But it had all been worth it. And it would be _incredible_, he laughed to himself, to see the look on his sisters’ faces when he brought a fucking dragon to battle. 

Flying back to Westeros makes Bran whoop and yell like a young boy, again, raising his arms over his head as Drogon swoops and glides in the sky. Meera’s hands grip tightly to the saddle, but he could feel her shoulders shaking as she laughs.

\---

Ghost’s head raises one afternoon as Jon is sharpening his sword across his lap, ears perked forward as if listening for something, or someone, and because of him, Jon is the first one to see Arya. She wanders through the camp, her intricate braid swaying to the root of her back, silver eyes thrown into contrast by the depth of her tan as they search the mass of people for familiar faces.

She has changed, of course, they all have. He doesn’t know why it surprises him so much. He doesn’t know why he had pictured her as he did when they were kids, covered in flour and laughing as she throws her arms around him. But the woman in front of him – and this is a warrior and a sailor and a woman in front of him – is one he hardly recognized. Jon stands up and strides towards her, one step, two, mouth open to call out her name – and her eyes alight when she turns to him.

“Jon,” she breathes, wide-eyed and surprised and expectant, all at once. It takes only a moment and they slam together, in a tight embrace that leaves almost no room for the shout of laughter that leaves him.

“Arya,” he says in return, savoring the feel of her name. He shuts his eyes tight as he curls his arms around her waist, burying his face in her shoulder. There is so much of him that never thought he would see her again, so much of him that thought he would sail away, she in the opposite direction, and he would die in battle or she’d be lost at sea or he’d freeze to death or she’d find some lover in Volantis and never return.

Jon eases her down to the ground, keeping his hands on her shoulders as he surveys her. Pants, of course, and dark hair pulled back from her tanned face, and a soft tunic that makes it clear that she’s no girl, not any longer, but a woman and – his cheeks are stained red as his gaze flickers back up to her eyes.

Arya brings a calloused hand up to his cheek. “It’s so good to see you again,” she says, rubbing a thumb over the scar across his chin.

“Aye,” he says, quietly, smiling as Ghost licks a wide stripe up her face and she grins, all too familiar with the habits of direwolves. “It’s good to see you too.” To see her again, even here, in the midst of war, it is a relief that throws the rest of him into sharp contrast. It is simple, yet he is ashamed to admit it: he hadn’t realized how much he wanted to see her again.

A uncharacteristically soft voice from behind him makes him turn. “Arya?”

They turn to see Gendry, clad in armor from this morning’s training, hammer grasped firmly in his shaking hand, a curious mixture of dread and elation across his dirt-smudged face.

“Gendry?” she says, stepping towards him. “What are you doing here?”

“What are _you_ doing here?” he says, tossing the accusation back at her as he crossed his arms. “I thought you were going to find what’s west of Westeros.” Jon feels his eyebrows raise in surprise at the bite in Gendry’s voice.

“I did, then I heard Westeros went to war again, so I came back,” she shrugs, as if it was as simple as all that. And maybe, Jon considers, it was.

Gendry shakes his head, anger clouding his face as he looks between them both – and there is something underlying the anger that Jon doesn’t understand. A fury in his Baratheon blue eyes that raises Jon’s hackles, even as he doesn’t know why. “You came back for _this_ – “ Gendry cuts himself off, exhaling sharply through his nose before consciously lowering his shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he says, quietly, before raising his eyes to Arya once more, offering a hesitant smile. “Welcome back.”

Arya considers him before nodding slowly. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Gendry swallows heavily. “I came for Sansa.” There is a fondness in his tone that is as unmistakable as the defensiveness, the tension in his shoulders at odds with the softness in his eyes.

There is guilt, there, Jon realizes, all too familiar with it to ignore the signs.

“Sansa?” Arya’s brow furrows and then clears in the same moment as she sights a pair of people coming up from lunch, bickering the entire way, standing high above the rest. “Brienne! Tormund!” And she is off, throwing her arms around them both.

Jon chuckles, but all humor drops from him the moment he sees Gendry’s face – a pallid grey, and the way his hand is clutched around his hammer like a lifeline. The light in his eyes has dimmed, and he turns to Jon. “Better fetch Sansa,” he says with a wary smile that feels like a storm building, like being uncertain if you’re on safe ground. Solid ground. Jon wonders, at this, for everything he has seen between them… it is solid as stone, a foundation to build on.

But he nods, and claps a hand on Gendry’s shoulder. “I’ll find her,” he promises, and ventures off.

\---

If pressed, Sansa would not be able to say how far she walked, or for how long – but she finds herself kneeling by a massive tree that has wood too dark to be a weirwood, but it reminds her of Winterfell all the same.

Reminds her of home, and of dreams discarded long ago.

When the maesters said she would not bear a babe – had they meant she could not bring a babe into this world, or that no babe would take root in her belly? There is a distinction there, a line that her greyed-out memory from those years struggles to differentiate. If it is the latter, they were wrong, or she misunderstood - or it is a gift from the gods, and she is full of hope.

If it is the latter – this is already impossible. She wraps her arms more tightly around her waist.

If it is the former -

She fears she must keep one more secret until the babe leaves this world to go into the next, without ever seeing the face of her son or daughter, without ever holding their tiny hands within her own, without ever seeing new eyes that seem to focus on only her. She allows herself one heartbeat of dreaming whether the babe would have Gendry’s eyes, or his smile, or the gentleness of his hands. To wonder what of her fierceness would be inherited, what of his softness. If the babe would have a dusting of auburn hair or dark as coal. To think of what could be –

Sansa presses her hands gently to the root of her stomach, and begins to weep. Whatever the answer, whatever the outcome, she has a babe in her belly at this moment – for she believes the direwolves and their messages, more than she has ever believed in the Seven – they are sent from the old gods, and they would not lie to her.

She has a babe in her belly.

Sansa closes her eyes and lets the tears stream down her face, lifting her face to the weak sunlight streaming through the clearing. She wishes for her mother as she has never wished for her before.

It is there that Jon finds her – slumped to her knees, tears long-dried on her cheeks, softly stroking the pup nestled into her side, with Nymeria curled protectively around the pair.

“Sansa?” he says, questioningly, coming around with slow steps to stand in front of her, to observe the glints of sunlight on her cheeks, the gleaming copper of her hair laid loose over her shoulder. “You alright?”

She offers him a smile, weak and wobbly though it may be. “Of course,” she says, “why wouldn’t I be?” Lies, lies. He is tired of them, aches for a time when the only thing between them is the truth.

There is a silence in the glen as he looks at her, really looks at her – grey eyes appraising the slope of her posture, the way she, Sansa Stark, seems to be laying around in the woods with a strange pup he’d never seen and the direwolf he’d know anywhere, when there are battle plans to be made and armor to be shined and alliances to be strengthened and endless, endless letters to be written. It is not like her, to wander like this.

Jon ponders, quietly, what could have happened to bring her here, this place that smells inexplicably of Winterfell, though it is several day’s ride to the nearest weirwood. He raises a hand to Nymeria, who noses her broad head into his palm and the edge of his mouth lifts into a half-smile, despite himself.

It’s as if she’d known.

Jon looks at Sansa, waiting until her gaze lifts to his before he speaks. “Arya is here,” he says quietly, “I thought you should know.”

The queen rises gracefully to stand in front of him, blue eyes alight with wonder and excitement and a small amount of dread. “Why didn’t you say so? Take me to her.” Her voice is imperious and yet, it shakes.

Jon can’t help but chuckle at her, even as he offers his arm, even as they start to walk quickly back to camp. “Yes, my queen,” he says, and it is light and teasing and joyful. His voice reminds her of when they would play at Florian and Jonquil as children, play-acting at love and drama and knighthood, and she cannot think of it, cannot reminisce, cannot spend any time in her past when her heart is thrumming in her chest just so. A hummingbird rhythm, pounding in her ears, in the tips of her fingers, in her stomach.

Her sister has returned, at last.

She is joyful, joyous, overjoyed at the very thought. She ignores the pit of her stomach that twines round and round, like several snakes, sinking low and heavy. She names it worry but knows the true identity: guilt, shame, dread.

What if he runs to her? What kind of sister would she be to begrudge their happiness?

What kind of mother would she be, to allow it?

What kind of _queen_ would she be – to raise a bastard for the throne? But it is here that she cuts herself off, firmly, glancing at Jon out of the corner of her eye. She would be a queen and mother, raising a beloved child in a kingdom that was granted peace in part, in small part, to the man walking beside her. Gendry was a bastard, and if his child is a bastard too, well, she wouldn’t mind.

There are far worse things to be.

Besides, the maesters’ words swirl in her head like tendrils of smoke, poisoning all of her hope. Her body will betray her, she will lose this babe, and no one must ever know. Sansa sighs, ignores Jon’s worried glance, and they walk on.

\---

She won’t fucking _look_ at him.

Sansa had embraced Arya tightly, fondly, stroking her hand along her sister’s braid and laughing at her stories. Her hand lay on Jon’s arm as they walked to her tent, a strange foursome, and then on the table during supper – when it would most often be grasped within his own, underneath the table. Her eyes do not cut to him as she laughs, her fingertips do not linger on his thigh, her gaze does not meet his with dancing laughter when Jon looks sourly into his ale as if it had mortally offended him.

It is as if he does not exist at all.

His heart pounds in his ears until he can barely hear the sound of them talking, of Arya singing sea-shanties and Sansa laughing, of Jon snorting mead through his nose when Arya imitates a shopkeeper she had met once, across the sea. Gendry tells himself it’s adrenaline, but he knows the truth. It tastes the same as just before every battle, every skirmish, every swing of his hammer. It looks like power and the exhilarating thrill of the unknown, but underneath, it is fear fear fear.

Finally, when all the candles have burned low, when Jon has slumped into his chair, eyes drifting closed, when Arya has nudged him awake and they stumbled out of the tent and out into the starlight – he remains.

Gendry sits still in his chair, hand wrapped loosely around his ale, as he waits for Sansa to meet his eye. He admires the glint of her braid, the way it reminds him of molten gold, the flush dancing along her collarbone, the delicate trace of her fingertips along the laces of her gown, as if she would disrobe at any moment. She moves restlessly around her tent, pulling together the goblets, clearing off the cheese plates – doing everything Minisia would scold her for, come morning.

“Do you want me to leave?” he says, finally, lowly.

Sansa merely tilts her head as she turns to face him, a strange hollow hope in her eyes, a vacancy and an all-encompassing sadness. “Arya is here. Do you really wish to stay?” Her voice is incredulous.

“Goddammit, Sansa,” he swears, slamming the ale down on the table. The genuine surprise on her face is like a knife to his gut. The assumption, implicit in her gaze, that he would go to his long-lost long-departed friend once-lover the very night she arrived, disregarding everything between them, everything they have _built_ together. He repeats himself as he stands, pushing back his chair and punctuating each word with a pounding of his fist on the table. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No,” she murmurs, eyes casting down to the floor as if it is a secret. And it is, he supposes, isn’t it? How much they want each other? They don’t admit it out loud.

But here, in the space between them, she is owed a confession. A truth for the truth.

Gendry moves around the table, approaching her as if she were a skittish fawn, hands out and palms up, beseechingly. Sansa looks up at him through her lashes as he places his hands tenderly on her waist, eyes glimmering in the candlelight. 

“Then I will stay,” he says, before soldiering on, “because I love you.” There is a sudden flare of brightness in her eyes, as if the candlelight caught its reflection in their depths, before the tears begin to gather and she pulls from him, turning away with whatever semblance stoic reserve she can muster.

“You should not,” Sansa murmurs. He moves forward anyway, remembering that initial flash of joy, that elation, wrapping his arms around her waist and tucking his head into her shoulder.

“I couldn’t stop now,” he says quietly, pressing a kiss to the curve of her neck, “not even if I tried.”

She places her arms over his own and curves into herself, and it is as if he can hear how much she is thinking, overthinking, considering all of the angles, and he is about to kiss her again, to try to draw her from that space where is held captive – when she turns within his arms to face him, placing her delicate hands on his shoulders, a fierce look on her face, a devotion. 

“I love you too,” she says, softly, with a tenderness in her gaze that he’s seen a thousand times before, and that he hopes to see a thousand times more. Sansa presses forward to lay a kiss upon his cheek. “Will you stay?” she offers.

“For as long as you want me,” he says, hoping beyond hope that she will want him forever.

Her hand in his, leading them to her bed, says enough in reply. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what even _are_ chapter estimates, you know?  
next update within the next few weeks!
> 
> EDITED (2/18/20): okay, next update definitely not within a few weeks. I have quite of bit of the next bit in a word doc on my computer, but due to impending insanity in my personal & professional lives right now (last semester of grad school + two babes + we're moving again this spring? + health issues) I haven't had nearly the time to write that I normally do. I'm pulling a JKR and scribbling on napkins in the margins of my time. but if you have read this far, know that it is coming soon! just not quite as soon as I would have liked. <3


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all SO much for your patience & kind words. I am nervous as fuck about this chapter - not only because i've been sitting on bits and pieces of it for so long, but also because it leans a different way than i intended to. i'd love to hear what you think! 
> 
> this has been a pretty terrible month, but fic has been a bright spot in all of that, and you all have contributed to making it brighter, so thank you for that. <3

When they wake with the dawn, her head tucked upon his chest and his arms wrapped firmly around her waist, his fingertips tracing delicate patterns on the bare skin of her back, Sansa thinks that she should tell him.

She will not.

(She aches to let the words spill from her lips).

\---

His blue eyes skittered away from her across the table. It shouldn’t have surprised her as much as it did – over and over again. Tormund stared at her, it was true, but much less than he once did. Brienne might have felt offended, but she had trouble feeling much of anything, these days.

Her days at King’s Landing had been filled with drilling the young soldiers, trying to whip a new Kingsguard into shape, guiding Podrick as he continued to slowly progress, helping to clean the grottos, hauling body after body after burnt body – there had been no time to think, there. No time to mourn. Even in the place that should have reminded her so much of Jaime – all golden spires, golden tiles, everything glinting in the bright morning sun – she did not think of him.

Couldn’t think of him.

Besides, she had always thought of him in the shadows, in the darkness – a pair of glinting green eyes, mud-splattered, laughing as he dances out of reach of a bear. His molten gaze in the hot springs. A kiss in the candlelight, his body over hers in the firelight’s glow. Watching him ride away from her, under the moonlight.

The memories make her feel hollow, desolate, loved and desired and left. So, she does not remember them, she does not feel.

Though she feels she must admit to herself that that… isn’t entirely true, not anymore.

She feels annoyed when Tormund stares at her, ripping into a leg of rabbit, before he glances away. Jon had lectured him, apparently, before they joined with the Queen’s army. Davos had told her, straight-faced but with eyes dancing, that he had not been allowed to come until he had promised to behave himself. 

She is oddly furious that he isn’t crossing the line, isn’t giving her an outlet for the frustration that keeps building. Jon had not clarified exactly what ‘behaving himself’ looked like – but apparently it was staring across the campfire, his eyes lingering on her in meetings, but glancing away the second her eyes dared to meet his own. Apparently, it was standing close to her, but not so close that she could justifiably give him a thwap over his tall, bearded head. She had always been able to elbow him, or step on his toes, or – she didn’t realize he had always been so close.

She feels a little lost that he is not consistently propositioning her. There is a part of her, bitter and small and made entirely of the girl she had been at twelve – a hulking beast of a thing, broad shoulders and long blonde hair and no sense of how she could ever be a lady – that wonders what she did wrong, to lose such affection. Even as it was unwanted.

At least, mostly unwanted.

Brienne snaps out of her thoughts as Davos steps next to where she was perched on a fallen log, sharpening her sword, grinding the whetstone across the blade over and over again.

“Ser Brienne,” he says, nodding as he settles himself opposite her, wincing as his knees creak. “Ah, I’m too old for this shite.”

She offers him a tight smile. “Davos.”

“I’ve come to trade.” A mischievous smile crinkled across his lined face, and she could easily picture what he must have looked like as a boy – all trouble. It’s no wonder he manages the youths so well – he understands them. She had never been the frivolous type, but she can’t help but to smile in return.

“What do you have to trade?”

“Information for information.” He brandishes a letter in his hand with her name on it.

Brienne narrows her eyes – sure that the second she leans for it, he will pull it from her grasp. “That’s mine,” she says, instead, setting aside her whetstone.

“It is. And I’ll happily give it to you, whether or not you answer my questions in return.”

She nods, satisfied – though she raises her eyebrow archly.

The old man looks around, and leans in, before asking, quietly: “Does she love him?”

Brienne’s brow furrows in confusion. “Who?”

“Sansa.”

“Does Sansa love who?”

“Whom,” Davos interjects, before shaking his head and chuckling. “I was talking about Gendry, but if she loves someone else, please, by all means.”

“Gendry?” Brienne wishes she would stop talking in exclamations, but she doesn’t know him, not well enough, not like she really ought to, after all that they’ve fought side by side numerous times. She had been busy, she thinks, defensive to her core, trying to make sure everyone she cared about didn’t die.

Davos merely looks at her, contemplative. “You can trust me,” he says, finally.

“I can’t trust anyone,” she replies. Not with this, not with the contents of her queen’s heart – especially when she’s not even sure if the queen knows, yet, the depth of her feelings about the dark-haired man who occupies her furs each night.

He surprises her when he smiles, broadly, nods, and hands over the letter. “I like loyalty. We’d make a good team, you and I.”

Brienne surprises herself by smiling in return. “We would.” That is the closest she will come to admitting anything – and she knows that he recognizes her statement for what it is: a confession.

The letter opens easily in her hands.

She reads it once, then twice, then a third time, just to be sure.

Yara Greyjoy was offering them aid.

_To a queen, from a queen, _Yara writes_. Let’s keep our crowns until they are wrenched from us. _

_Let’s rise again. _

\---

When they ride out along the soldiers, her pale horse contrasting his dark mount, sharing fond smiles and calmly murmured battle plans, his hand reaching out to catch hers and kiss the tender, scarred skin of her palm, Sansa thinks that she should tell him.

She cannot.

She _must_ think of what it would cost her. 

\---

Arya feels like a child, returning to this place – a child and a changeling, all at once, to have expected everything and everyone to have stayed the same while she grew and became something altogether new. She felt a stranger, here, among her own people and the wildlings and Gendry’s people, when just a few years ago, she would have felt completely at home with them.

She would have wondered, halfway, in the recesses of her mind, if Gendry’s people would become hers, and then slipped from the thought like a cat in the shadows.

He had asked her to stay, and she thought, even as the words slipped from his lips, too eager and hopeful by half, that he must have known what her answer would have been.

It had been fear, then, of being constrained, of being held down and made, somehow, to be someone less. Someone made only for having children and running households and doing the tasks she had been trained to do but detested. She had known, on some level, that Gendry would never have forced that on her – no, he had loved her too much for that – but there would be expectations, from others. Disappointment, when she refused to be the lady they wished for, and then it would reflect on Gendry.

That is what she had told him.

The truth was somewhat more complicated.

It had been partially fear, then, and a longing for something greater. She had seen _dragons_ and White-Walkers and great, lumbering giants and the terrible, truly awful wights – and everyone else seemed to be settling in for normalcy, even as the blood kept thrumming in her veins. Kept demanding something more than this, more than council meetings and arguing from dawn until dusk over borderlines and inheritances and redistribution of crops. It had been insistent as a drum beat, a siren song, calling her across the sea – she could not have resisted it even if she wanted to. (And she hadn’t).

And now, having returned, she chides herself for not expecting that others might have changed too.

Sansa, Gendry, Brienne, even Tormund has been altered in her absence. 

Only Jon – steady, stoic Jon – is ever the same, except for a scar across his chin that she had to restrain from running her thumb across its ridges, asking its story, asking his story. She had thought she’d known it; now, she wonders if she had ever known him at all.

But Sansa, and Gendry – they stand taller. They are older. And they seem to orbit around each other, the sun and the moon, ever circling, barely glancing at each other, but working in tandem. He unrolls a map, she places a candle across the corner to keep it from rolling back on him, even as she pens her letters. She leans into his warmth as they walk to queue for dinner with the soldiers, not quite touching - but not quite not touching, either.

Arya thought nothing of it. Well, almost nothing of it. They had been the ones left behind, the first ones to join to fight – why shouldn’t they have a bond, a friendship? Why would she begrudge them that?

Until she sits next to Jon around the fire, savoring the bitter tang of the ale and pressing her leg against Jon’s, for warmth, for security, for the feeling of home.

“It surprised me,” he murmurs into his tankard, “when I saw them together.”

“Who?” Arya asks, eyebrows raised, even as her stomach sank.

Jon just glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, offering a knowing smile, before lifting his chin to gesture at the tall, dark-haired man towering over a willowy redhead, pressing a tankard of mead into her hands as she laughs, protesting.

Arya feels as though a veil has been lifted from her eyes. Blind again, she chides herself, to the ways of the heart, to the hearts of the people she loved. Once, she remembers, glancing sidelong at the man to her left, it had been the way Sansa looked at Jon – like he had chiseled his initials into her heart as if her heart was a weirwood tree, leaving it scarred and ever dripping and all the more magical for her sacrifice. 

Her hand twitches towards the scabbard at her waist without thinking, rage coursing through her veins, flushing her ears pink in a way that she hadn’t allowed since she was a child.

Calm waters – stormy sea. She is so lost in anger she does not realize Jon’s hand has come to rest on her knee, anchoring her in place, anchoring her in this world.

The look of sympathy he gives her is almost too much to bear, for all that it reeks of pity. Of understanding.

Words spill from her mouth before she considers them.

“Spar with me?”

Jon takes a long, considering look – followed by a long, considering drink of his ale, before nodding, solemn as a sparrow. And they slip off, into the night.

When they had stumbled from Sansa’s tent the night before, Arya’s arm slung across Jon’s shoulders and laughing uproariously as he finished singing – badly – the only sea shanty he had learned, she could recognize that this was not the way she thought her night would end.

She had thought, in some, small part of her (the same selfish, childish part she had thought gone forever), that he may have seen her and opened his arms and she would have thrown herself into him, the solidness of him, the comforting steadiness of his gaze, a mountain that will go on existing. Arya had thought she’d left that girl at the forge, in those nights before the longest night - that when she pressed her lips to his cheek and stepped onto that boat in King’s Landing – that she would feel little for this boy who became a man in her absence, broad shoulders and a set to his jaw that dares anyone to cross him, to crown him.

Her heart aches a little more than she thought it would, seeing him love another.

Seeing him love her sister.

_I came for Sansa_. She snorts as she and Jon slipped away from the crowds, from the fire, finding an open clearing in the woods not long after. Who didn’t? She heard her sister was fighting for their home, for her crown, and she had ventured back to Westeros as quickly as she was able – and even poor, banished, broody Jon brought wildlings and his moods along. To hear Brienne speak of it, even their little brother may be joining them, once he’s fulfilled whatever quest is next.

They’re both a little in their cups, movements sloppier than they ought to have been, and slower – but something buzzes in her veins as she feels the steel of her blade thwack against the wooden training staff he’d pulled from the camp as they escaped. She doesn’t let herself think about what she was escaping from – not the people she loved, not the expectations and hopes she’d once had – just matches him, hit for hit, strike for strike, until they stand, chests heaving and at an impasse.

Until they collapse, panting, to the ground, her shoulder pressed against his own as she leans into him, unconsciously, the way she has only ever leaned into Jon. For steadiness, for support. 

There’s still a blissful emptiness in exhaustion that allows her mind to cease its rambling. 

And in the clearing, in the glow of the moonlight, it is simple.

“I think he loves her,” she sighs into the darkness.

“I think she loves him,” he murmurs to the stars.

There is a matching wistfulness in his tone that makes Arya wonder what else she may have missed in the hectic time before the Long Night, after Jon became their cousin, after Sansa tried to keep him close, and he left anyway.

But in the wistfulness, in the confessions between them, there is also a farewell.

And a new beginning.

\------

It takes a month for Jon’s plan to be enacted, for all of the pieces to slide, carefully, into place. For Yara’s men to arrive, with the flinty-eyed queen in their midst, calloused hand resting constantly on the axe at her side, free with bawdy jokes and tight-lipped about her brother, however much Sansa wants to talk about Theon with the only other person who had truly known the goodness in him. 

Each morning that Sansa rises with the dawn, eyes fluttering open and her back pressed to Gendry’s chest, Sansa rests a hand on her swelling belly for a half of a heartbeat in surprise and growing hope.

Each morning, she remembers the maesters’ words and cringes and yet –

And yet, each morning, when Minisia laces her into a gown or her armor, it fits a little less well. By the end of the month, the carefully hammered breast plate does not rest properly across her shoulders, does not fasten the way that it truly should around her waist, no longer as narrow as it once was.

In the early hours of the dawn, once her hair has been braided and rogue streaked across her pale cheeks, Minisia does her very best to properly squire for her lady, brow furrowing as she tightens and maneuvers and loosens and eventually settles. “My lady,” she starts, hesitantly, a look in her eyes that speaks to a future, but Sansa cuts her off.

“I know, Minisia,” she murmurs, turning to pour hot tea with a shaking hand. Sansa can feel the excitement welling up in her handmaiden, and notches her head down. “I am not meant to bring a babe into this world.” The words are soft in the pale pink light of the dawn, and disappear into the morning mist. “Just do the best you can to fasten the armor.”

The young girl opens her mouth to protest, to point out the nearly-almost-obvious, but snaps it quickly closed at the desolation on the queen’s face. There is tragedy, there, etched in the bones of her past and anticipated in the days to come, and she does not know all of the songs that have been sung about Queen Sansa’s time with the Boltons, but even whispers of lyrics have been enough. It is her duty to care, and protect, and she will do both, as best she can.

But she cannot help the final whisper that escapes her lips as the queen turns to leave the tent: “I will pray to the old gods for this babe, my lady.”

Slipping out, she misses the way Sansa’s eyes widen, misses the way the willowy woman traces her fingertips over the pale white scars across her palms, remnants of a sacrifice, remnants of a prayer.

A curse or a gift, a gift or a curse.

Neither, both.

A _babe_.

Sansa thinks, again, that she should tell him.

It is untenable, to keep this this secret. Unthinkable. Unbearable.

But it would be worse to tell him.

(Wouldn’t it?)

\---

Bran sends a letter, just one, to his sisters:

_When the shadows loom in the east, you shall find me there – I am not coming alone. _


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, here we are.  
the final chapter.  
it's so bittersweet. 
> 
> i never could have made it here without all of you following along & commenting & kudo-ing & just generally being so fantastic. i have loved writing this fic, something about it was just so cathartic for me following the dumpster fire of season 8 (as well as the dumpster fire of, you know, current world events). i needed some closure and just... more to the story. 
> 
> thank you for following along as i tried to tell my version of it.  
<3 <3 <3

When the young knight slinks into the camp in the wee hours of the night, when the whole world seems to calm, he is hoping for glory, mostly. As well as the promise of a pretty girl waiting at his camp roll, a new set of armor with the gold from this success. He considers duty, contemplates honor, but it is the glory that drew him to volunteer for this foray into the enemy's campsite. It was a funny thing, to consider someone an enemy who you've never looked upon, whose lands you have no dream to occupy, whose people you do not like or want, but who is he to muse about machinations far above his station? He smooths back his hair as he quietly lifts his sword, ducking into the queen's tent. 

Had he been thinking more about what he was about to do, and less about the buxom brunette who had winked at him the night before, he might have noticed that the campsite was quiet, yes, but unnaturally so. He might have noticed, perhaps, that the fires were not low, but completely extinguished. And had he been a more discerning lad, he might have thought to abandon his mission and tell the commanders of the Tyrell army that no one was there. The campsite was abandoned. 

But when he sneaks through the camp and into Sansa's tent, he is not thinking of any grand schemes, or plotting ways to win battles, he is hoping for glory. But there is no tall, formidable ice queen, slumbering upon the furs. Instead, there only a slip of a woman, long dark braids coiled around her head like a circlet, eyes gleaming and a curious empty smile playing upon her lips. The young knight softens his stance, and lets his shoulders fall, before he notices the thin blade she is maneuvering from hand to hand, as if they were as much a part of as her very fingers. It was alarming, but the look in her eyes raises the hackles on the back of his neck. 

It is not fury, nor blood-lust, only pity. 

Glory seems a paltry thing, now. 

\--- 

When the Tyrell armies, and the Dornish, and the Lannisters (Sansa had always forgotten just how _many_ cousins there were), and the sparrows and everyone who had anything to gain from this war gather together and ride into the encampments shortly after dawn, banking on the element of surprise – they pull their horses to a complete halt.

The fires are doused, and they seem like they haven’t been lit for weeks. The tent doors blow askew in the wind. It is silent, eerily so – no horses, no soldiers, and certainly, definitely, no queen of the North. (The young knight from before would have reported that to them, had he been allowed to return).

The commanders pause, uncertain.

This was supposed to be an easy victory: the battered North, already war-weary and only half-recovered from the Last Night and the Long Winter, were supposed to be here, were supposed to be trampled under their hooves with ease. The queen was supposed to be taken hostage, and forced to marry some lowly Tyrell or another, kept far away from all of the intrigues of court.

Supposed to be. It was a dangerous phrase, a dangerous assumption to make, though they don’t know that yet.

(These green men did not know her well, if they expected her and the North to fall into line, just so).

The horses whinny nervously and start stamping their feet. The mist of the morning has wound through their ranks like a poison, and so when the shadows pass overhead, they discount it as nothing – at first.

\---

Jon had been the one to think of it, the stories that Bran had told him when he was young and excitable, thoroughly enthralled in the haunting stories that Old Nan would tell, about the rivers and the mists and the ways that men could travel without being seen or heard, if they were with the crannogmen. The plan had been simple – it had been the implementation which had been difficult. Moving what amounted to four armies through the woods and the glens and the rivers to surround the oncoming force, without alerting their scouts, without making it seem like anything had changed. More and more men had slunk away each night, under the pretense of mead loosening their lips and walk and bladders – before circling back to escort their horse into the woods.

Whispers had reached them from little birds in nearby villages that the enemy forces planned to attack before the dawn. So, they had ate and drank and fucked and swore and then completely emptied the camp into the nearby woods, just far enough that no errant noises would reach the ears of the commanders once they arrived. 

The wildlings, the wolves, the soldiers from Storm's End, the soldiers from the North, the soldiers from the Iron Islands... Arya had known but perhaps had not realized exactly how many fighters they had on their side, how many were willing to defend the North and it's people from onslaught, once more. But here they all are, gathered in the woods before the dawn - ready at last. 

They are waiting only for her - their sword in the night, the eyes in the mist, protecting the queen from threats all around. She hadn't been surprised that they sent a soldier to try to end the battle before it had truly begun by ending the queen of the North herself, and gods, who knows what he had been promised in order to tempt him on a mission that they must have known was suicide.

They ought to have known, they surely would have heard: the Red Wolf rides with the Bull, the full forces of the North and Storm's End, the wildlings, and - though Arya did not like to think too highly of herself - the assassin.

Songs were written about Jon and Daenerys - even now, years later, she cringes at the thought; songs were written about Bran and Sansa, and once, when sailing out into the unknown, she had heard the soft strains of a song written for the beautiful Missandei. (It did not speak of her death, but only her life, her love, her devotion, the way her skin glinted in the candlelight; it remained in her head for months at sea). But they were not the only heroes, not the only Starks that songs were written about - at least one ballad was composed (poorly) about the sure-footed, gray-eyed girl with a dagger which still had a tingle of blue, at the right angle in the moonlight.

(That was true, though she'd never actually shown anyone).

The girl who killed the Night King.

She had stayed away from her celebration feast, preferring to celebrate privately - but it was a strange guilt that kept her away, not lust. She kept thinking that it should have been Jon, in the end. But stories are never written the way they planned. Gods be good, if her parents could see them all now...

A king, a queen, a commander, an assassin.

Arya does her very best not to imagine the look on her mother's face, tinged with disappointment, even as she dispatches the soldier with an easy grace that feels more like dancing than dancing ever has. She pretends to have completely forgotten her father's face - which is difficult, when her cousin looks so much like him that sometimes it hurts to see his face. But then he grins, or broods - and the set of his jaw, the creases above his eyes, the scar across his chin, it's all Jon.

It takes only a few moments of slipping through the woods before she arrives to greet them, and sees Sansa standing with Jon and Gendry in a small clearing. Arya joins them, tossing the extra sword in her hand to Jon, before turning to greet her wolf. Nymeria sits on her haunches, finally content to cease her restless prowling across the tree-line waiting for her girl's return. Arya, all too aware of the bond between them and the damage that the distance has done to it, presses her forehead against the great beast's snout, and promises her a better tomorrow, wrapping her fingers in the soft fur behind her ears. Finally, she turns to her sister. 

"It was just as you thought," Arya murmurs into the stillness. "But it was only him. They've gotten arrogant down in the South." Her smirk is edged in steel and twice as sharp. 

Arya rests her gaze on each member of their queer quartet. Jon finishes strapping the extra sword into a scabbard on his back, after admiring the weight and heft of it, though none compares to his own sword. Arya offers a wicked grin when he turns to thank her, knowing that dark red smudges artlessly smeared across her cheeks give a haunting quality to her face, even here in the trees. Gendry meets her gaze with kindling in his own, jaw set in anticipation. Sansa's braids are intricate, today, and lovely like a wildfire is lovely, and the blue of her eyes is incandescent in contrast. It is almost enough to distract her from the way that her sister's armor doesn't exactly fit, not quite the way it should, but it's too late now to puzzle over why.

The sun is rising.

The queen nods. 

The wolves begin to howl. 

\---

In the moments before, Gendry pulls Sansa behind a nearby tree, pressing her to the bark and bracketing her hips with his own. His hands trace her cheekbones, her jaw, the fierce traces of red across them, and he kisses her fiercely - a promise, an assurance. It is something left unfinished. 

"Come back to me," he says. 

She tilts her head to press her forehead to his, hands grasped tightly in his tunic. "Always," she whispers, something desperate in her voice, something sweet, something ready for this all to be _over, _at last.

\---

Jon does not say goodbye before battles. Neither does Arya. They are practical people, far too reasonable to be concerned about lingering glances or farewell kisses when their blood is up, when the adrenaline has begun to buzz in their veins, when the drumbeats of battle have begun to sound - but they stand shoulder to shoulder until the last possible moment, and if his hand grazes hers, well, who is to say that it wasn't an accident.

If her shoulder presses into his for comfort, for strength, for motivation, well, no one noticed, in the quiet hum before they begin to run. 

\---

It has been raining all morning, a spitting rainfall that leaves the red on Sansa's cheeks running town like red tears. Whatever beauty her mother had once praised, it is hidden, now, behind the face of this warrior woman, wielding her dagger with more dexterity than she'd ever thought possible, though she is sheltered behind Brienne, with Podrick on her left and one of her lower commanders on her right, Nymeria standing almost as tall as a horse, canines dripping with blood.

She is safe, she is protected, she is in the midst of battle and the drumbeats echo in her ears, her heart, her gut. What is beauty, compared to this rush, this exhilaration? (She has never understood Arya quite so well as in that moment).

But then... 

In the midst of the chaos and the bloodshed, the flash of silver swords in the light, the hoofbeats and the running and the grunting - Sansa had never thought battle would be so _noisy_, but she was almost used to it now (though some things, she would never get used to) - a shadow passes overhead, and then once more, as if the clouds themselves are moving. 

Sansa pauses, whirling Iara to face the oncoming threat, a certain horror dancing in her veins as the recognizes the shadows in the sky for what they are: massive dark wings, soaring across the sky just above the clouds. She swallows heavily, white-knuckle grip on the reins and Iara arches her neck impatiently. The dragon swoops below the clouds and into the vision of all the soldiers - enemy and friendly - and they all still at once. Sansa would laugh, for it was almost comical, these sudden statues on a battlefield, the whites of their eyes showing as they trace the dragon's path, awaiting destruction - would laugh, except for that she cannot move, cannot breathe, cannot hear anything over the roaring in her ears. She is taken back, immediately and at once, to the sheer terror that trio of dragons had beckoned forth years ago. 

Her nightmares were made of dark wings, of fire and ashes and terror - of a petite woman who did not know when to stop. (Has she gone too far, pursuing this war? This battle? How many lives will be lost because she could not negotiate peace for her people? She needed no priest to interpret her dreams; she need only look into Jon's eyes, that dark, regretful grey, never at rest, never at peace). 

The pounding of her heartbeat slows, gradually, and the sounds of battle return. The clashing of swords, Brienne's low voice asking if she was alright, and... laughter? 

Something about the sound transports her straight back to Winterfell as a child, sitting dutifully for her lessons as she heard her brothers laughing rambunctiously in the courtyard, wooden training swords smacking each other. 

Something about the laughter sounds like Bran. 

She looks up, once more, as the dragon swoops by the battlefield. 

There are two figures on his back, no pale hair in sight, but only a dark, shaggy head and one piled high with curls, whooping and yelling as the dragon dove down lower, swooping in gentle arcs across the field.

_Bran_. 

Sansa lets out a bark of laughter herself before throwing her arms up, exasperated with her little brother. She can hear Arya hollering at her little brother, wherever she is, obscenities that once upon a time would have had their mother threaten to wash her mouth with soap. He had told her, had written a letter, but had it truly said anything? No, of course not. She turns back to observe just as the soldiers from the Tyrells have started to fixate on the great beast, to yell to each other and their commanders for guidance, for direction - what are they supposed to do against a fucking _dragon_? Sansa would have felt for them, if they had not been on the opposite side of a battle field.

Her soldiers look to her, Gendry looks to her, battle-worn face hidden within his helmet, and she watches, as if in a haze, as he gathers his reins to ride to her side, raising his axe and - she cannot think of a better way to tell him she is safe than this: she pulls hard on her reins, whirling Iara up onto her back legs, letting out a guttural, distinctly un-beautiful yell, raising her right arm and gesturing _onward, forward, this is ours, this is for us, destiny is on our side_. The commanders understand her completely, the soldiers nod and pound their chests and charge once more.

Sansa had been taught that there was power in a song, and that is true, but sometimes a song is a battle-cry. 

\---

The battle rages for hours, the rain does not lift, and Drogon does not once open his mouth to unleash hellfire on the soldiers below.

It is a relief so great that Sansa nearly sags in her saddle as the morning stretches into the early afternoon.

The enemy forces retreat, then the commanders come forward on their mighty, exhausted steeds - waving a flag fashioned of a tunic that just happens to be close to the shade of white that says _enough_. _We are finished_.

(They had not come prepared for a surrender; somehow, that makes it taste all the sweeter).

Drogon lands softly behind her - Sansa insistently, carefully, does not shudder, does not turn, and she rides forward to accept their surrender, and negotiate the terms for freedom for her people.

\---

When Sansa rides back into camp with her commanders at her side, she is exhausted and exhilarated, though she keeps her shoulders firmly in place as she observes the camaraderie amongst the armies, the clanking of mead and the tending to the injured. The mourning of the ones they had lost - she will be writing letters to families all of the next week, and it makes the victory taste bitter in her mouth. But despite that, despite everything - they have _won_. She is not so naïve to think this will be the last time they will fight or the last battle in her lifetime or the ones to come - but while she had been unsatisfied with the terms of peace nearly three years ago... now, now, there was a plan in place, an inheritance, a guarantee of freedom granted to the North and her people, the wildlings, the Iron Islands.

The wildlings had been carousing even as the enemy had begun to retreat, yelling loudly and dancing and - thankfully - taking their more passionate encounters to more private areas. The only exception had been the towering man with the ginger beard, clad in furs and axe still tucked into his waistband; Tormund had sought out Brienne at a lonely fire, contentedly eating her bowl of stew, and joined her quietly, laying his axe next to her sword. Brienne's lips had lifted at the corners, and she had not moved from her seat. It was enough, it was, perhaps, a beginning. 

Yara was in the next tent over, already deep in her cups and with what had looked to be Minisia happily perched on her lap. Sansa had raised an eyebrow in surprise, and the maid had blushed prettily before joining in on another round of their drinking song. So, she thinks, it wasn't Podrick that she was infatuated with, after all.

When Gendry catches Sansa within his sights, beginning to slump in the saddle, he merely sighs in relief and strides towards her horse, helping her down and clasping his hands around her arms, loosely, as he scans her for injuries.

"You're alright?" he asks, voice low and eyes bluer than she's seen in contrast to the mud and blood smeared across his face. Gendry drops his voice even lower. "You're both alright?" 

Sansa looks up at him sharply, resisting the urge the bring her hands to the soft swell of her stomach, instead curling her fingers into fists at her side. Gendry only chuckles and presses a tender kiss to her forehead.

"Sansa, love, I'm a bastard, not stupid." 

"I - " she finds herself at a rare loss for words. "How long-" 

"-have I known?" he asks, raising an eyebrow, continuing once she nods. "I don't know, a few weeks at the most." His voice is almost a whisper, it is so soft between them, Iara buffering her from the rest of the world. "I woke up one morning, my hand on your stomach, and I just... knew." 

She wants to ask if he's distraught by the news, but the broad grin on his face, the way his eyes squint at the corners when he's truly happy, the way he picks her up to twirl her around in his embrace - it is enough of an answer. Sansa blinks rapidly to try to clear the tears from her eyes, but gives up when Gendry sets her down and wraps her in his embrace, resting his cheek against the crown of her head.

"I don't know if I'll be able to keep this babe," she warns, voice tight and on the verge of cracking. . 

Gendry lets out a short laugh and holds her even more tightly. "I woke up this morning not knowing if I'd see you this afternoon, but here we are." 

Sansa pulls back to tell him of the maester's words - but they are long muddled now, blurred by years and by Gendry's good faith. Instead, she smiles softly, reaching up a hand to stroke the side of his jaw, pulling him in for an affirming kiss. "Here we are." 

\---

Arya's eyes search through the masses, the broken, the bleeding, the men limping victoriously for a bowl of stew and a cup of mead, and still, she does not find who she is looking for. Quick as a cat, ignoring the twinge in her right arm and the gash on her leg that is bound to scar if she does not tend to it soon, she winds her way through the crowd, looking and waiting and - 

Jon finds her first. He claps a hand to her shoulder and swings her around to face him. She throws herself into his arms and he presses his lips to her temple as he wraps his arms tightly around her waist. "Arya," he murmurs, and that is enough. 

\---

When all the work has been done - terms negotiated, the retreating armies disappeared over the hills to lick their wounds and write their reports, the injured tended to and stew made - they sit, once more, in Sansa's tent, gathered around the table. Sansa sits at the head, armor still tied loosely around her waist and streaks of red on her cheeks, with Gendry on her right, sweat-stained and muddy and tracing patterns on her thigh underneath the table - a promise of a reunion underneath the furs. Sansa shivers at the heat in his eyes, even as she averts her gaze to avoid blushing here, with all of them gathered around the table: Jon and Arya on one side, Meera and Bran on the other.

What remains of the Starks and the ones they love. It would be terribly mournful if she weren't filled with such overwhelming joy. 

Besides, she cannot stop looking at Bran and marveling at the changes in him. He smiles, broadly and often, and his eyes are the same she remembers from before the all-seeing nonsense: open and earnest and so incredibly expressive. He looks at Meera like she was personally responsible for the sun rising in the east each morning. Sansa cannot help it - she returns his smiles fondly, and with only a hint of exasperation. 

"You could have mentioned you were bringing both your pregnant wife _and_ a dragon," Arya says as she drinks her mead, rolling her eyes as Bran only grins at her. 

"I told you," Meera mutters, elbowing Bran in the side and laughing as he puts his hands up in surrender. 

"What if it had been intercepted?" he says, calmly, reasonably, as if anyone in the world would have believed the dragons still existed on this earth, let alone that he could find one, ride it, and convince it to come back to Westeros to battle for the North. The whole idea was ludicrous. No one would have believed it, she reasons, even as she snorts and pretends to agree with him. "Besides," Bran says, turning to Sansa with a broad grin, "I told you I'd make it for -" 

"Yes, Bran, and we're so happy you're here," Sansa smoothly interrupts, ignoring the strange looks from Jon and Arya, and the puzzled glance from Gendry. She had suddenly remembered the last promise Bran made to her as the three-eyed raven, and she has no wish to discuss that with everyone gathered at the table, although, judging by the glint in Meera's eyes as she looked between Sansa and Gendry, others may already be aware of his words. 

"-the wedding," he finishes, with a smirk and a mischievous glint in his eyes. 

"Wedding?" Jon and Arya both turn to her, speaking out simultaneously. 

She holds up her hands, asking for peace and a moment to explain - but Gendry interrupts. 

"Only if she agrees," Gendry says, pleasantly, only the tight grip of his hand on her thigh betraying his nervousness, the quick glance of his blue eyes to hers and back to his mead and back to her once more, lingering.

Sansa looks at him in honest shock.

"If you want to," he posits, turning to face her, boldly - as Jon and Arya exchange knowing glances and Meera watches with wide eyes. "Do you... not want to?" He is hesitant now, in the face of her raised eyebrows and blatant, total reveal that she hadn't considered it at all.

"I -" Sansa takes a moment. "It's not just because..."

Gendry shakes his head vehemently, before pulling a small, glinting token from a chain around his neck, putting it on the table in front of her. "I forged you a ring after the first time I saw you in battle."

She is speechless; she cannot resist picking it up as he mentions, having learned something from Ser Davos, after all - "I have no desire to be king, Sansa, only the man you share your life with, if you want."

The ring is inlaid with a small sapphire and a small ruby - it coordinates with her dagger and circlet, alike, and it is _lovely_. It is hers. She slips it on her finger, and looks up at him through her lashes, eyes blazing. 

"I do," she says, face serious even as her heart pounds in her chest. "I want that, I want _you_."

"Then you have me," he says, raising her hand in his own and pressing a tender kiss to her knuckles; the pure adoration in his eyes is almost too much to bear, and she laughs in near-relief as Arya and Jon slam their mugs of mead against the table and sing a sea shanty to celebrate, one Arya had taught them the first night she returned. It spoke of a siren in the sea and her happy lover, drowned in her waves; it wasn't an auspicious song, but she suspects it was the best one they knew. Gods, Jon probably didn't know any cheerful songs whatsoever - though he laughs as Arya's mead splashes on his face.

She had never imagined a scene such as this, could never have pictured it three years ago, as she watched them all depart from her side as if they were eager to go. And now, as she rests her hand gently on her belly and looks around, she has the urge to sing.

Her voice is rusty, under-used these last years except for fond humming and soft crooning here and there.

But now, in this tent, in armor that Gendry made for her and her circlet woven into her braids, red streaked down her face and looking like a warrior queen of legend, she lifts her voice and sings once more.

A song of spring.

\---

In the end, Bran stays for the wedding at Winterfell- during which Brienne and Ser Davos both pretend that they are not weeping, openly. Jon offers to escort Sansa to the weirwood tree, but she declines, choosing instead to walk by herself. Bran and Meera reside at Winterfell until the babe is birthed - a squalling set of twins, as it turns out - then journey to the Neck to find her family. 

In the end, Arya joins Jon and the wildlings as they venture back across the fallen wall, through the forever open gate. She says that she is looking for new adventure, and there is a truth within that lie that Sansa isn't sure that even she can see, not yet. She hears the chorus begin anew - _everyone you love leaves you_ \- but she knows, now, that they'll return, when she has need of them or before. And besides, not everyone she loves leaves her. Brienne decides to stay, Tormund conveniently decides to stay nearby and help a new group of wildlings set up a village. Ser Davos happily helps to coordinate the transfer of power at Storm's End to a new lord, and agrees to stay on and advise him for one year, before moving his family to Winterfell as well. 

(It is beautiful - Winterfell, in the dawn of summer. There is still a briskness to the air, particularly in the mornings, but the flowers bloom in the most vibrant colors. Sansa visits the weirwood tree and pays her respects, noting the blood-stained bark at the base and wondering at what interventions magic and fate have occurred on her behalf, to lead her here).

It feels like the end of an epic song, but Sansa knows it is just the beginning. She croons a new song as she cradles their baby girl against her chest, rocking her to sleep as she stands in the window, watching as Gendry rides back into Winterfell, back into his home. 

**Author's Note:**

> as always, thanks for reading & following along! you can come fangirl with me on tumblr: jolie_unfiltrd


End file.
